I HATE PHOENIX

With apologies to Cole Porter:

I hate Phoenix in the springtime,
(Sometimes it’s over 100 degrees, even in April.)

I hate Phoenix in the fall,
(still 105 degrees one recent year on October 24.)

I hate Phoenix in the winter when it drizzles,
(don’t hold your breath waiting for a white Christmas.)
(We may host the Super Bowl, but thankfully our lousy team will never be in it.)

I hate Phoenix in the summer when it sizzles,
(Oh, do we have to mention this, 110 day after day after day, except when it rains and then it’s only 105.)

I hate Phoenix every moment,
(It’s a sanctuary city, with a sanctuary newspaper, and there are more fatal traffic accidents here than anywhere I’ve ever been. Thanks to liberals in this increasingly blue state, nothing will get better. The present here will always be better than the future. Crime won’t go down, but property values and wages will.)

Every moment of the year,
(especially on New Year’s Eve, when people fire random gunshots into the air–and the gunshots in my neighborhood begin after sundown. Did I mention the neighbors who race their motorcycles at midnight and their brat children who throw “fart bombs” on our porch every time we leave hom, and sometimes when we’re here.)

I hate Phoenix, why, oh why, do I hate Phoenix?
(Maybe it’s the burglary of our house in April or the grafiti everywhere. Then again, maybe it’s my low salary. We can’t afford a Christian education for our children, and we can’t afford their public school indoctrination either.)

Ah, but my love is near, we’ve been married seventeen years, and even if we could find a way to move, the only thing we could get away from would be the exasperating heat.

Two, four, six, eight,
Dear Lord, please help us relocate.

Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar,
If Moses leads us out,
We’re surely gonna foller.

NO HEROES AT COLUMBIA

On Monday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University, much to the dismay of many of us. I would not object to Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia, simply because he is doing great evil in the world. However, even though we are not at war with Iran, except possibly for some covert operations, they are clearly at war with us, as even the president of Columbia indicated when he introduced Ahmadinejad and mentioned that Iranians are very active in Iraq, directing their efforts toward killing as many Americans as possible, driving us from Iraq and attempting to cause the collapse of Iraq’s elected government. In a time of peace, it might have been OK to allow a tyrant with genocidal views to speak at an American university. The fact is, however, that Ahmadinejad is actively working on his destructive vision, a vision which includes the murder of all Jews and Christians, and many Moslems as well.

Even though the president of Columbia University harshly condemned Ahmadinejad when he introduced him, it seems only to have been meant to deflect criticism toward Columbia, which opened its doors wide to Ahmadinejad, but keeps them tightly closed to Americans who have politically incorrect ideas, including Christians, minutemen and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfield. If Americans can’t speak at Columbia, one wonders why those who are killing Americans can.

But those observations are not uniquely my own, and they have probably been expressed more eloquently by many in the alternative media, though certainly not by anyone in the mainstream media, which continues to flounder in its maze of deliberate ignorance, asking Al Gore and George Soros for direction.

What I found most disturbing on Monday was not Columbia’s invitation to Ahmadinejad, nor Ahmadinejad’s speech, which I only read portions of, but the reception Ahmadinejad received from Columbia’s students. According to the sound bytes I’ve heard, they booed him loudly, not because he is killing Americans, not because he wants every Jew dead, not because he is spreading terrorism throughout the Middle East, not because he is pursuing nuclear weapons with which he wishes to kill Americans, but only because he is not promoting homosexuality in Iran. We are raising a generation of airheads if none of these other things matter as much to the students at our supposedly finest universities as Ahmadinejad’s contention that Iran does not have a homosexual problem. I suspect that’s not true. But if it were true that Iranians don’t struggle with homosexuality, that would be a good thing.

As I listened to excerpts from Monday’s speech, what caught my attention is that this was a confrontation of two forms of evil. There were no heroes at Columbia on Monday, when the apostle of terrorism, who wants everyone dead except for his personal Islamic sect, met our homegrown American sodomites and their supporters. Unless Ahmadinejad and/or the students at Columbia come to repentance and a personal faith in Christ, all I can cheer for is mutual destruction. It goes without saying that it is not my job, as a human being, to persecute homosexuals, or to judge anyone for their sins, unless I’ve been given judicial or political authority, which I haven’t been, since I have my own sins to deal with. However, I am obligated, as a Christian, not only to believe the account in Genesis 19 of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, but also to support God’s judgment about it. I don’t think God is sorry, and I don’t think he made a mistake. That leaves me with no one to cheer for at Columbia this week.

On Wednesday, the retiring head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, again stated before the senate that he believes homosexual acts are immoral. He was booed by protesters in the gallery, who called him a biggot, and the senate had to be closed temporarily.

The notion that it is just as good and appropriate for men and women to have sex with members of their own gender, rather than the opposite sex, is intuitively false, even if one only considers the nature of human genitals and the complimentary forms of male and female sexual organs. If one thinks from there to the essential nature of maleness and femaleness, things boys and girls tend to do differently even before society teaches them anything about gender identity, and the different preferences and complimentary nature and personality of men and women, the preference for homosexual sex become even more absurd. When I was a teenager, I discovered that I particularly liked women, not because of their bodies, but because of their emotional, psychological and spiritual makeup. If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, why would I, as a Martian, want to be intimate with another Martian? I’ve been to Mars. I’ve been on Mars all my life, and I can’t get off Mars by myself. I can only get to Venus with a woman’s help.

Then there’s the issue of producing and nurturing children. Anyone who has been loved and disciplined, even for a short period of time, by both a mother and a father, is better off than a child with one parent of either gender, two fathers, two mothers, or three or more competing parents of various genders. I once knew a woman who was raised by her mother and a succession of six stepfathers, and she felt her situation was quite unfortunate. That’s a heterosexual problem, which won’t be improved if the courts decide the number and gender of a child’s parents doesn’t matter. Two homosexuals cannot raise a child together unless the parental rights of a genetic parent are terminated, or the other genetic partner becomes a third parent, presumably a part-time parent.

The agenda of homosexual activists is to destroy the family and replace it with complete social, moral and legal chaos. Social, moral and legal chaos has become the primary mission of our supposedly great universities. If the powers that be in academia have their way, most college graduates will live out their lives in a complete moral vacuum, with no knowledge of their Creator and no idea what sort of lifestyle really benefits people they know personally or society in general.

Yes, there was much worth booing at Columbia on Monday, but it wasn’t just the guest speaker.

NOT YOUR FATHER’S FIGHTING IRISH

I usually don’t write about sports. But from time to time, something which is happening in sports has broader implications for society in general than it does in the sports world.

Like many people, I have been following the unfolding disaster of Notre Dame’s 2007 football season, if anything that produces a final score can really be called a disaster. Notre Dame has lost their first four games, and I believe there is a real possibility they may not win a football game this fall, not even in November, when their schedule is less demanding than it is in September and October.

Just for perspective, it’s worth noting that Ara Parseghian, who coached at Notre Dame from 1964 through 1974 only lost three games during his first three seasons. Notre Dame’s 1966 team gave up 38 points all season, the same number Michigan scored against them in this year’s September 15 game. The 1966 team shut out six of their ten opponents, including a 51-0 win against USC and a 38-0 win against Oklahoma. Parseghian wasn’t just a good coach, he was terrific. Knute Rockne himself probably couldn’t have done any better.

Yet, near the end of his coaching career, Ara Parseghian’s star began to fade. The 1974 game at USC, in which the Trojans scored 7 touchdowns in the second half, wasn’t just a game; it was a statement that USC’s recruiting base was now better than Notre Dame’s, and it was an indication of Irish miseries yet to come. Ara Parseghian was still a great coach and Notre Dame was still really good in those days, but things were beginning to unravel.

Lots of people hate Notre Dame and love to see them struggle. But for me, Notre Dame athletics, and football in particular, is part of the tapestry of America. It’s supposed to be successful most of the time.

We’re very far away from 1966 now, and what’s happening this fall shouldn’t be a big surprise to us. Notre Dame has been going to bowl games in recent years, but they’ve been soundly and consistently thrashed in them. The current state of affairs has been gradually developing for a long time. There hasn’t actually been a decade in which Notre Dame was the dominant national team since the 1940s, yet somehow people seemed not to notice until this fall. There isn’t going to be a new batch of national championships and Heisman trophy winners in South Bend for the foreseeable future, if ever.

Integration allowed black athletes to stay in the south, instead of going to the midwest. Ivy League schools lost their division one status 25 years ago.
Many universities decided to compromise academics in order to become football and basketball factories, and Notre Dame thought they could have it both ways and be successful in both. It can’t be done anymore. Generally, great universities are lousy football schools and great football schools are lousy universities.

Beyond that, there has been a demographic shift in the United States, toward the south and both coasts and away from the midwest. Part of what’s happening at Notre Dame is also happening at Michigan, at Wisconsin and even at Ohio State, which is why the Buckeyes finished a distant second in last year’s national championship game.

Notre Dame’s glory days are as gone as the Studebaker. Furthermore, as the auto industry continues to flounder and more and more manufacturing jobs disappear, the midwest is becoming the new south. Big labor is now little labor, and the big ten is becoming the little ten, or perhaps the little eleven. South Bend is the capital of the new south, and its population has been declining since 1960. We may soon wake up in a nation where Michigan, Ohio and Illinois are as impoverished as Mississippi has been traditionally, and that’s why this is not just a football story. The University of Michigan may not be as far down the path to desolation as Notre Dame, but they’re on the same path.

The new reality is that Notre Dame is now the equivalent of Duke, Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Rice, and firing the coach won’t fix the problem, just as firing his predecessors didn’t fix the problem. Notre Dame will have many better seasons than this one, but the real glory days are over, probably forever. There will be a lot of pressure on the university to become another LSU, but I hope Notre Dame will choose instead to continue to be a great university, because they have a real chance to be successful at that.

We should all be unhappy about Notre Dame’s decline, because it’s part of our nation’s decline. Business isn’t just moving south, it’s moving offshore, and that affects all of us. Notre Dame is trying to wake up the echoes of a fading past, and so are we all. Take a moment and wish them well.

WELCOME TO LAODICEA

Anyone who has never heard of a place called Laodicea can find out everything we know about it in Revelation chapter 3, the last book of the Bible. Verse 17, in particular, presents a contrast between what Jesus said about the church in Laodicea and what the Laodiceans believed about themselves. The Laodiceans believed “we are rich, we have prospered and grown wealthy and we lack nothing”, but Jesus calls them “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked”. This contrast begs the question, how could they not have known their true condition? I can only guess the answer to that question, but I think my guess is reasonable. I believe the voice of warning was silenced in Laodicea. By the voice of warning, I mean the parental voice which says things like, “you could put your eye out with that” or “don’t play with matches”.

I was reminded of Revelation 3:17 two Sundays ago in church, though it was never mentioned. The pastor asked everyone to open their Bibles to the book of Jude, which is quite unusual, both because it’s a small book and because it is very stern in its tone. To my astonishment, however, the pastor only spoke for half an hour about four of the 25 verses, verses 20, 21, 24 and 25. Those four verses are the only four encouraging verses of the book. The rest of the book, particularly verses 1-19, are a very stern warning about the consequences of sin. Those 19 verses are the primary reason the book was written, but they were excluded from the Sunday, August 26 sermon.

My wife listened to the sermon at face value and told me after church how good she thought it was. I said, “It was a very pleasant sermon, and I didn’t disagree with a single word of it. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I were a pastor and I gave sermons like that. Some time this week I dare you to read the entire book and afterwords to ask yourself if what you heard this morning was the primary intent of the author.” My wife’s basic reaction was that I’m an idiot, which is usually her first reaction to anything I say. But then she read the book and she got my point. The fact that she listens to me eventually is probably why we’re still married.

The voice of warning is on nearly every page of scripture from Genesis to Revelation. Contrary to common belief, it may be even more prevalent in the New Testament than in the Old Testament, yet it has virtually disappeared from our churches. My purpose here is not to criticize my pastor or the church we attend. I’m almost sure he agrees with me about what the book of Jude means, but he is apparently not interested in telling the congregation. I won’t speculate here about why he omitted the primary message of the book, because I haven’t asked. Ignoring
the voice of warning will take place in virtually every American church service throughout the country again this Sunday. As I told my wife, “For the most part, churches have stopped serving cake, they only serve frosting.” I like frosting as much as anyone else, but it’s not meant to be eaten by itself.

My point goes well beyond theology. I knew there would someday be a hurricane Katrina forty years before it happened. I didn’t know when it would happen or what the storm would be named, but I knew it was coming. We all knew it was coming, yet no one in New Orleans was prepared for it. I know it’s humanly impossible to be prepared for everything, but there are many things headed right at us, things far worse than Katrina, things we are not preparing for.

But none of society’s ills worries me as much as the unprepared church. For example, several weeks ago, during another church service, our pastor asked if anyone had anything to share. My wife’s elbow was in my ribs immediately, because she knows I always have something to say. I had been studying the epistles of John, and I became interested in how much they echoed what Jesus said during the last supper. So I went to the microphone and I asked, “Does anyone remember the first thing Jesus said after Judas left to betray him? It’s significant because he was alone with all of the real apostles, and no one else, for the first time we know of. In John 13:34-35, the first commandment he gave us was to love one another, and he added that men would recognize his disciples by their love for each other. Priority number one for this church should be to develop a Christ-centered community of people who are willing even to die for each other, if necessary.” Everyone applauded, but nothing has changed. American Christians always applaud when they hear pleasant things, and then they wait to hear something even more pleasant. I’m not encouraged by applause. I’m grieved almost to tears by not having anyone really listen. Nothing scares me as much as the unprepared church. It is so pleasant living here in Laodicea, and it’s so dangerous.

WHAT WASN’T SAID

Even though I’m not happy about the constant barrage of election year politics in a non-election year, I decided to listen on satellite radio to the most recent Republican debate among the eight officially declared Republicans who aspire to the presidency.

I kept waiting for a defining moment, when one of them would set himself apart from the others and prove to me that he was more presidential, more principled, yet more pragmatic, and more wise than his colleagues. For me, that moment never came. Yes, Ron Paul is different, but whether we should be in Iraq or not, he clearly does not grasp the significance of the growth of Islam in the world, and he certainly has no idea what to do about it, except the idea of retreat, surrender and capitulation to their every demand. If I want to do that, I can vote for Hillary. I don’t need Ron Paul. On second thought, I still wouldn’t vote for Hillary, but the point remains that I don’t need Ron Paul if I want to vote for isolationism.

By the way, I would love to be an isolationist. It’s much closer to my heart than America as world policeman. But isolationism can only be practiced if we are willing and able to produce everything we need to consume and if other people are willing to leave us alone if we leave them alone. Neither of those things are true in our case.

We are producing less and less of everything. We have allowed ourselves to become a consumer nation, and above all else, we depend on foreign oil. Our failure to provide for ourselves is shameful, but we are where we are, and it can’t be changed overnight.

Secondly, Ron Paul’s belief that the Islamic world will leave us alone if we leave it alone is demonstrably false. The French aren’t doing anything to the Islamic world, except trying to hide from it, yet the French police are afraid to go into Moslem enclaves in Paris. How about Thailand? Thailand has no military presence anywhere, but they have a thriving Moslem insurrection.

What struck me most about the debate, though, was two words which were never used at any time. The first unused word was “Bush”. John McCain mentioned the president in passing by acknowledging that he and the president worked together on the failed immigration bill, which many Americans, including me, were opposed to. Other than that one reference, there was no mention of the current two-term Republican president, which is really astonishing in a debate of Republican candidates. I guarantee that next year’s Democratic nominee will not run primarily against the Republican nominee, but he or she will instead run against the record of this administration. While Democrats run against this administration, Republicans will apparently be running away from it, unwilling to speak about its successes or its failures. It would make much more sense, in my opinion, for the president to get both applause and criticism from the current Republican candidates. But complete silence says a great deal, and one thing it says is that none of these Republicans should expect to be in the White House on January 20, 2009.

The other word which was neither uttered nor asked about is even more significant. That word is “China”. I predict that soon after next summer’s Olympics, perhaps at the very beginning of the next administration, there will be a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and it is likely to be a very bloody invasion. What is our next president going to do about it? Nothing, and they all know it, and the Chinese know it.

Even the press can’t ignore the daily recalls of toys, food and every other unsafe thing which is coming to us from China, some of which is the product of the slave labor of children. Last night there was silence about our trade deficit with the Chinese, how many American dollars they hold as the result of our deficit spending, and how they are beginning to dump those dollars in an apparent effort to undermine our currency.

There was complete silence last night about Chinese espionage, most recently including hacking into Pentagon computers, as well as computers in the U.K. and Germany. We Americans are not even wondering out loud what Chinese motives are, and we ought to be wondering a great deal about it, because the Chinese are being very aggressive on a number of fronts.

In fairness, Duncan Hunter has spoken about our problems with China, but there has been a deafening silence from the rest of the Republican field, and there was complete silence from everyone last night. Unfortunately, I’m left with the impression that none of these people are ready for the presidency. Furthermore, whether the next president is a Republican or a Democrat, it seems to me that their chances of making the world a less dangerous place for Americans are slim and none, and that’s not good.

By the way, none of these candidates mentioned Russia either, nor did they seem concerned about the expansion of NATO to Russia’s doorstep, which I believe is a mistake which continues to be passed down from the Clinton administration.

Isn’t it also odd that none of these candidates talk about crime, except for Rudy Giuliani, who tells us he solved the crime problem in New York by himself, apparently with no help from the police or anyone else? Giuliani keeps telling us he’s a great leader, but great leaders have followers, and Rudy has never once given credit to a follower for anything, as far as I know. Here’s a hint for America’s mayor. If you want to become the president, try congratulating someone besides yourself just once.

Of course, I can’t fault people for not answering questions they weren’t asked. So part of what I’m saying is that the debate questions need to be a great deal better. Perhaps one or more of these men have the potential to be good presidents, if they were elected. But the fundamental problem with the American presidency is that there is no appropriate training for it. It’s a job men either grow into or fail at. Being a senator, a congressman, a governor, a former first lady, a former mayor or a millionaire lawyer and claiming it has prepared one for the presidency is roughly analogous to me claiming that I am prepared to manage a chain of Italian restaurants because I have eaten spaghetti once or twice. Even the vice presidency isn’t good training for the oval office. A former vice president led us into Vietnam, and another led us into the Watergate scandal. The presidency is so unique that it has become a crap shoot for both the voters and the candidates.

DE-SEXING AMERICA, PART 2

This story is about a friend of mine whom we will call Kate, because there is actually no K, no A, no T and no E in her real name. During my senior year in high school, several of us had lunch in the cafeteria together every day, including Kate and me. I developed an intense (though fruitless) crush on Kate that year for the following reasons:

1. I regarded my family as the ultimate dysfunctional family, and I was looking for a girlfriend whose family members were closed and cared about each other. Kate talked about her family in nearly reverent tones during lunch every day, which I thought was awesome, because I had lost my reverence for my own family.

2. Kate was one of the best students in our senior class.

3. One day during lunch, she asked us what alcohol tasted like. Her parents had made sure she never had any, and she didn’t seem to mind. She was just mildly curious about it. My father was an alcoholic who beat my mother in front of us, tried to strangle her and fired a bullet into our ceiling on one occasion. My parents divorced when I was nine. Kate’s virtues and innocence were just what I was looking for. I loved that girl.

Unfortunately, over time I awkwardly and painfully discovered that I had nothing to offer Kate, which she wanted, and we went our separate ways.

We went to universities in different states, and I remember something she told me about one of her college experiences. She had dated one of her fellow students, who lived off campus. One day he invited her to his home. While she was there, she noticed the names on his mailbox, the name of the boy she was dating and the name of his wife. Kate broke off the relationship immediately.

Fifteen years after high school, I was still single, I no longer had a crush on Kate, but I wanted to know what had happened to her. So I called her and arranged to fly back to my home state for a visit.

Kate was also still single, and I enjoyed seeing her again. But while I was with her, she told me that she had recently had a steamy affair, which she called explosive, with a married man who lived in San Francisco. She also said that she had had a two-year affair with another married man. I don’t know how, when or why she changed, but I noticed a more hardened and cynical attitude than I had ever seen in her before. She was a bit like a turtle, who still had a shell, but the soft and vulnerable part of the turtle under the shell was missing. She lost more than her virginity, she lost the best part of herself.

Kate and I both eventually married. Neither my wife or I have been married before. But Kate is her husband’s third wife. She says his prior divorces were not his fault. Perhaps that’s true, but third wives don’t fare well statistically. I hope they beat the odds, and I went to their wedding.

I will close by saying that Kate has always been polite and gracious to me. I haven’t seen or spoken to her for nearly a decade, and I’m almost sure I could still find things to like about her today, which is why I won’t post her real name. I hope she doesn’t have to pay the full price for her mistakes and her carelessness, because I still care about her.

DE-SEXING AMERICA, PART 1

I grew up as a Catholic in New Mexico. Fortunately, I did not know until I was grown and had left the Catholic church that the Catholic hierarchy had repeatedly used New Mexico as a dumping ground in which to reassign priests who had been accused of sexual abuse. Obviously, it wasn’t happening to everybody, because I grew up without knowing about it. However, I actually attended one of the churches in New Mexico which eventually became famous for sexual abuse, so it wasn’t far from me. New Mexicans knew about the sexual abuses perpetrated by some members of the Catholic clergy 15 years before the rest of the country began talking about it.

Unfortunately, there is a similar scandal within our school system, primarily within the public schools, but also even in Christian schools. By some estimates, the sexual abuse of students by teachers in our schools is 100 times more frequent than anything which ever happened in the Catholic church. Outside of home schooling, there is no absolutely safe place for conscientious parents to hide their children, and home schooling isn’t practical for everyone.

Nothing has bothered me more in recent weeks than reading an article called “The Big List” on the worldnetdaily.com web site. The article details approximately 100 allegations, and the legal results thus far of those allegations, against 100 female teachers. Very few of these cases eventually lead to a jury trial and a conviction, for various reasons. The students range from high school students down to fourth graders, who are really not in a position to testify in a courtroom about what has happened to them.

Part of what’s disturbing about this is that so many perpetrators these days are female. Sexual physiology being what it is, since men become sexually aroused much more quickly than women, I feel certain that women are only a small part of the total problem. When women, including some up to age 50, who should be having hot flashes, are instead introducing boys to sex, one has to ask some serious questions.

For one thing, if there are so many Mrs. Robinsons among us, what is Mr. Robinson up to? Though none of this is new in human history, it does seem that we are producing more and more sexual predators. Isn’t this the direct result of deliberate choices our collective society and we individually are making every day? Isn’t one predator too many?

In fact, let me point the finger at myself for a minute. I ride public buses back and forth to work. I try not to object to the music the bus drivers listen to, partly because it sometimes results in arguments with other passengers who actually like what they’re playing, and partly because the bus drivers spend a lot more time on the bus than I do. This morning, a female bus driver was listening to a station which I always find disgusting, but I decided to try to tune it out. They had a promotion which claimed that if someone would listen to their station for an hour, they would probably be in a much better mood. Immediately after that, they played a song called “Nasty Boys” by Janet Jackson, which, as the title implies, is a complete piece of filth. But I was almost at my destination by then, so I didn’t say anything. It is absolutely impossible for people to view and listen to erotic entertainment from morning until night without being affected by it. Until we drive pornography out of the mainstream and back into the closet (not that it even belongs there), we will not be able to do any better than the following examples. I left the names out because I want to forget them.

“Minister’s daughter from Laurens County, S.C., was a second-year teacher at Bell Street Middle School in Clinton, S.C., when she was fired Feb. 28, 2007, for allegedly having sex with at least five boys. Some of the purported victims, ages 14 and 15, were students at her school. Authorities say the married woman had sex with the boys not only on campus, but also at a motel, in a park and behind a restaurant.” She didn’t learn that in church. But come to think of it, I’ve been a Christian for a very long time, and I’ve heard very few sermons about sexual misconduct, even though there is ample biblical material for them. Since she’s married, couldn’t she consider having sex with her husband, who she exchanged wedding vows with. I wonder how much Janet Jackson she has been listening to.

“Education technician was arrested in January 2006 after a 15-year-old boy at the alternative education school in Warren, Maine, told police he had an ongoing sexual relationship with her. Flirting allegedly eventually led to an estimated 200 sexual encounters. In December 2006, she received three and half years in prison, with all but one year suspended, and four years probation.” Let’s see, 365 days in jail for 200 sexual encounters. That’s less than two days apiece. We sure taught her a lesson.

“Woman, age 50, Boca Raton, Fla., music teacher reportedly slept with 11-year-old former student, and also had a simultaneous sexual relationship with the boy’s father. In a deposition, the boy’s father said he had the same sort of sexual relationship with her that ex-President Bill Clinton had with Monica Lewinsky.” That one really begs for a sermon. In fact, Leviticus would call for an execution. We think we’re too enlightened for that, but perhaps we’re just overly fond of our perverts.

“A former Colorado social-studies teacher, who also happens to be married to the principal, was charged in November 2006 with having had sexual contact with a 17-year-old male student during an overnight school camping trip. The instructor, who also coached cheerleading, pleaded guilty April 24, 2007, to felonies of tampering with physical evidence and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She also pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of unlawful sexual contact with a minor. She was not expected to serve any jail time.” The principal’s wife? That’s just too sad to comment about.

“Parker, Colo., English teacher at Elizabeth High School was arrested in December 2006 for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old football player the day after her divorce was finalized. According to the arrest affidavit, she and the teen had sex on the floor of her hotel room while her two children, ages 4 and 8, and their 17-year-old babysitter slept on beds in the same room. She was charged with sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust, a Class IV felony.” There’s got to be some special corner in hell for people who do this in front of children.

“Grand Rapids, Mich., teacher at South Haven’s Baseline Middle School pleaded no contest to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old female student she “married” in a pagan ritual in June 2004. She is also accused of touching the girl’s genitals while camping in public parks.” At least 14 of the 100 cases in the article involve lesbian relationships, and we’ll see a lot more incidents like this if we codify gay marriage.

“Teacher at Holley Elementary School in Sylvester, Ga., charged with performing oral sex on a 9-year-old boy in April 2005, allowing students to gaze down her blouse and slashing her wrists with glass in front of her students. Though she originally pleaded not guilty, she changed her plea to guilty just before trial, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison for aggravated child molestation.” I wonder if her lawyer claimed that a chemical imbalance in her brain caused her lapses in judgment.

There are about 93 other similar examples in the worldnetdaily.com article. These are just a few, which illustrate how sick these crimes really are. I don’t know how to turn the society around, but we have to shut every door to sexual temptation in our own lives, and we have to speak up against the oversexualization of everything in our culture every time it comes up. I failed to do my Christian duty on the bus this morning, but I can’t afford to fail anymore. These are difficult times, because hardly anyone is as conservative as I am. I would rather listen to Lawrence Welk than Janet Jackson, but he isn’t on the radio anymore. I am surrounded every day by people who insist that Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” was no big deal, but I think it’s a very big deal. Sodomy U.S.A. is driving me nuts. I have more to say about this subject, which I will post some other time.

ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

Thirty years ago today, I left work early, went home to my studio apartment and turned on the news. The newsman said, “The man who sang this song is dead.” I thought, “Bing Crosby has been ill”, so I expected to hear “White Christmas”. Instead, I heard “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog”.

I can’t quote what he said precisely, but some time after Elvis died, Colonel Tom Parker was quoted as saying something like, “Elvis has died, but we’re still selling records and memorabilia. Nothing has changed.” The saddest thing to me is that Elvis somehow ceased to be a human being even before he died, but he continued to be an industrial commodity long afterwords, and the colonel and others raked in more and more cash based on his talent, not theirs. I don’t blame the individual people who visit Graceland or who buy Elvis records, because many of them probably did at least try to care about Elvis the man, not just Elvis the performer. But for Elvis himself, life was too short, there were too many drugs, probably too much casual sex, too much money, but far too few of the best things in life, which are supposed to be free. I don’t think Elvis ever recovered from the stillbirth of his twin brother, the early death of his mother, or the way he was manipulated by others to have a career which often served their interests better than his. In the end, Elvis was just a sad reminder that it’s possible to have everything and simultaneously have nothing. He was a Cleveland Browns fan, and he probably could have afforded to buy the Cleveland Browns if he had wanted to, but I doubt if Elvis had one single genuine friend.

Yet I remember Elvis as polite and gracious, a far more real person than today’s celebrities. It’s true that the Beatles were far more clever than Elvis, but even in his opulence Elvis retained some of the virtues of industrious, conservative, faith-based blue-collar Americans, virtues the Beatles never had. He deserved a better fate. In his honor, I left work early again today. The king is dead, and even though I’m not all shook up, Elvis deserves to be remembered from time to time because his mortality reminds us of our own, and the brevity of life compells us to do something good while we’re here.

PINE TREES AND CATHOLICS

Earlier this week Pope Benedict XVI announced that the Roman Catholic church is the “one true church”, and he said that other ecclesiastical communities are not churches in the truest sense, and they lack the “means of salvation”. According to Pope Benedict, the Catholic church is the one true church because Jesus only established one church on earth, and it’s his church because he is the successor to St. Peter, who Catholics recognize as the first pope.

As an ex-Catholic, I cheerfully acknowledge that there is nothing new about this doctrine. Catholics and non-Catholics have heard this from popes for hundreds of years. Therefore, many may dismiss this story as irrelevant old news. But I think it’s worth replying to, for a number of reasons.

First of all, even those who agree that Pope Benedict XVI is the holy father of the only true church should be willing to acknowledge the poor timing of this reaffirmation of this doctrine. Both Catholics and non-Catholics currently face vicious assaults on the Christian faith, however they define it, from both the secular and the Islamic world. The current assault on both the Christian faith and on the traditional values of all Christians is so severe that both Catholics and non-Catholics would do well to find common ground where it exists, not in order to ignore differences, but in order to work together to defend common elements of both our faiths and our values.

Though I am an ex-Catholic, I’ve never been particularly fond of Catholic-bashing, and I understand that the head of any church needs to give his congregants reasons to stay in the church instead of leaving it. One thing we can all agree about is that an empty church is no church at all. If Catholics are comforted by the belief that they attend the one and only true church and that other ecclesiastical communities are not truly churches, I’m glad they are comforted by their belief, but they should be prepared to hear a gentle rebuttal of the pope’s position.

I used to have a friend who argued that the term Roman Catholic is an oxxi-moron, because catholic means universal and Rome is a particular non-universal place. Indeed, the non-universal universal church has an obvious rival, the orthodox Catholic church, which manages to be Catholic without either being Roman or recognizing the pope.

More to the point, my experience as an American Catholic was always that there were two Roman Catholic churches, one composed of devout Catholics and one composed of careless Catholics, careless because they couldn’t care less about what the pope says or what their church teaches. My mother calls herself a Catholic, yet she hasn’t been to a mass since the last time I asked her to go to one with me, which was back in 1974. I’m not criticizing my mother for missing mass, because I don’t attend mass either. Yet, though she calls herself a Catholic, my mother is no more Catholic in practice than a pine tree is. One of the reasons I left the Catholic church is that it consists of a very high percentage of pine tree Catholics. At least 90% of the Catholics I grew up with were such shallow Catholics that their Catholicism was unrecognizable outside the church doors.

I know there are devout Catholics who take their religion seriously and I admire their steadfastness, even though I disagree with them about a boatload of theological issues I won’t mention here. But if the pope is leading the one true church, he is leading the most faithless of all Christian congregations. For example, when Pope Benedict was chosen to succeed John Paul II by the college of cardinals, I, as a non-Catholic was very pleased that the Catholic church had chosen someone who would continue to uphold traditional values of the Catholic church, particularly with regard to marriage and abortion. I actually like Pope Benedict, and I have a fair amount of respect for him. But when one of my careless Catholic co-workers heard he had become the new pope, his response was simply, “That’s a bad choice, this pope’s an idiot.” This point is so important that it’s worth saying it twice. Other than this one true church and papal infalibility bit, I rather like Pope Benedict, and I’m inclined to believe he is both a gentleman and a scholar, in spite of some differences I may have with him. Yet it’s rare to hear anything positive about him from the legions of non-practicing, couldn’t care less Catholics who have very little use for this or any other pope because they have individualized their faith to suit their own secular lifestyle.

Of course, what I’m describing here is not just a Catholic problem; it probably exists in all churches. But a general lack of commitment and a tendency to make up one’s own version of one’s religion is a particularly acute problem among Catholics. Of course, that’s not Pope Benedict’s fault, and I’m aware he’s doing his best to try to deal with the problem of pine tree Catholicism. But there is plenty he can do within his own church to keep busy without lashing out at other Christians.

As for the argument that he is the successor of St. Peter and he is therefore supreme over all Christendom, I have several problems with it. For one thing, for any pope to claim infallible leadership of even his own church because he traces the papacy back to Peter ignores the fact that St. Peter himself was a very fallible human being, both before and even after Pentecost. Galatians 2 says Paul opposed Peter to his face when Peter behaved differently among Jews than among gentiles, yet Peter endorsed Paul’s writings in his own, though no one has ever claimed the apostle Paul was anyone’s pope. Paul had clearly never heard about Peter’s infalibility, his papacy or his supremacy over all Christians, and neither apparently had the Jewish Christians in Acts 11 who incorrectly disputed with Peter about taking the gospel to the gentiles.

In addition, the pope’s argument is precisely the same sort of argument the Jews had with Jesus in John 8, when they argued they couldn’t be wrong because they were descended from Abraham and were therefore descendants of God. Jesus responded not only by saying that they were not behaving as Abraham did, but he even called them children of the devil. I’m not saying any such thing about Pope Benedict. But surely he is learned enough to know that a God who has never automatically passed his election down through generations of the families of the patriarchs of the faith would be unlikely to pass it down through the college of cardinals. I understand that papal infallibility is an article of the Catholic faith. But as I’ve already indicated, if the first pope wasn’t infallible, it’s reasonable to have questions about the others. By the way, anyone who studies Matthew 16:18 carefully will understand that with the phrase “upon this rock I will build my church”, Jesus is saying that his church will be built on the larger rock of the revelation that he is Christ, not on the smaller rock, which was Peter.

Of course, I don’t think Peter ever thought he was the pope, much less an infallible one, but I’m more interested in going on to my final point than speaking further about St. Peter.

With regard to the pope’s claims that only the Catholic church has the “means to salvation”, one might reasonably ask what those means might be, aside from faith in the atonement and resurrection of Christ. All of us who have children know how hard it would be to lose one of them. If all God wanted for us was to have the pope’s blessing, would it be worth his time to allow his own Son to be executed without intervening on his behalf? I should think not. If anything other than the blood of Christ could have purchased mankind’s redemption, Christ would not have come to this earth. Faith in that redemption is not confined to the Catholic church.

Again, I’m inclined to like Pope Benedict, except that I don’t feel the least bit guilty about not reporting to him, and I find the fact that the church in Rome is still trying to insist that only they have the means of salvation rather irritating. The pope’s claim that I haven’t been to a real church since I left his is quite false, and he would know it himself if he had followed me around.

Undoubtedly, some would argue that the claim of Christians that Jesus is the only way to God is similarly irritating. Yet if one believes scripture, as I do, no one else, certainly not the pope, Mohammed, Buddha, Moses, or any other religious figure, can claim a virgin birth, a sinless life, a redemptive death, resurrection and the right to return to judge the living and the dead.

My faith is not in myself or in the pope, but in Christ alone, and Pope Benedict XVI should be asking Catholics to put their faith exclusively in Christ, rather than seeking his blessing or the blessing of the Lord’s mother. His failure to do so is what really ails the Catholic church.

ABOUT THE REAGAN LEGACY

I often hear and read from conservatives glowing appraisals of the life and presidency of Ronald Reagan. Anyone who runs for the Republican nomination for president wants everyone in the GOP to believe he’s the new Reagan. Below are my thoughts, both good and bad, about the life and times of Ronald Reagan.

Reagan emerged in the political arena by making an impassioned speech supporting Barry Goldwater during the 1964 Republican convention, back in the days when Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater girl. I never heard the speech, so I can’t judge it, either in the context in which it was delivered or from the present vantage point. But that speech did two things. For those who listened and liked it, it propelled Reagan into the California governor’s race, which he won in 1966. For those who weren’t paying attention, including me, it forever linked Reagan and Goldwater, and the latter was rejected in the 1964 presidential election by 45 of the 50 states. Ronald Reagan was therefore viewed as a John Bircher, an ideological extremist, who couldn’t be trusted with practical matters. That’s what Republicans thought of Reagan. What liberal Democrats thought of him was entirely venomous. Moderate Democrats (now an extinct species) would eventually vote for him, but liberals always have and always will regard Reagan as the boogie man, worse for them than Richard Nixon.

My point here is that no one else in American political history has ever overcome being considered too extreme, even by most of his political party, in the way Reagan did, so much so that he is lionized constantly by Republicans today. There has been a lot of talk through the years about Reagan Democrats, but people forget that it’s really quite remarkable that there are even Reagan Republicans. I was so skeptical about Reagan that in spite of being a Republican, I voted to re-elect a miserable failure of a president in 1980, rather than voting for Reagan. I didn’t want anyone following Ronald Reagan around with the nuclear football, because I thought bombing really would begin in five minutes.

Once he was in the White House, Reagan won me over. He was very good at communicating simple truths. We all knew the Soviet Union was an evil empire, and once we realized Reagan would act prudently, we didn’t mind him saying so out loud.

When Reagan cut taxes, I lost my fear of “voodoo economics”, because things got better instead of worse.

I thought Reagan was going to get a bunch of people killed when he fired the air traffic controllers for going on strike, but it turned out he was right. Other people stepped in and performed their jobs admirably.

In many ways, Reagan was better than advertised. He had a gift for seeing possibilities others had given up on, meeting with Lec Wolessa and Pope John Paul II, and outspending the Soviets on defense, until the Soviet economy collapsed and they could no longer retain their grip on eastern Europe.

He defined his legacy with four simple words, “tear down this wall.” It was what most of us wanted, but Reagan dared to say so publicly, instead of clinging to diplomatic niceties, and Reagan was instrumental in the wall’s collapse, the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

Conservatives love to speak endlessly about Reagan, as the 20th century’s Abraham Lincoln, a man who emancipated half a continent. Historians may differ about what share of the credit belongs to Reagan, but even his critics will find it hard not to acknowledge his contribution.

However, there are some dark corners of the Reagan legacy, which conservatives ought to acknowledge. I’m going to skip the Iran-Contra scandal. Some Democrats managed to care about it, but I never did.

President Reagan failed in three areas. In the MIddle East, he failed to support Israel’s bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq, and he opposed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, actions which I believe were necessary for Israel’s survival. Anyone who disagrees about Lebanon should remember the Lebanese civil war which was happening there before the Israelis arrived, and what has been taking place in Lebanon since they left. In my view, Reagan failed to support Israel, as he should have.

More importantly, he left our Marines in a vulnerable position at the Beirut airport, and 240 of them were killed by a single suicide bomber. Of course, President Reagan was only guilty of a lack of foresight; the terrorists themselves were guilty of murder. After that, the Reagan administration essentially abandoned the Middle East, hoping Arabs would send us oil, but leave us alone. No matter what anyone thinks of the current administration, it’s not realistic to suppose we can import large amounts of oil from the Middle East, but the nations there will leave us alone. Perhaps no one accuses Reagan of being a failure in the Middle East, because it’s nearly impossible to be successful in that part of the world. Nevertheless, those who constantly tell us Reagan was a genius with regard to the Soviet Union should acknowledge that his foreign policy was far less effective elsewhere.

It was Ronald Reagan who gave us the original 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens. If it was supposed to stem the tide of illegal immigration, it failed miserably. Like all other recent American presidents, President Reagan failed to defend American sovereignty, and his failure has helped lead us to the current situation, in which our border guards are attacked at least 20 times a week. Conservatives who are disaffected with President Bush with regard to immigration should remember that he is carrying part of Reagan’s legacy forward.

Finally, President Reagan was personally an eloquent advocate for the rights of the unborn. But it was Reagan who made the politically expedient appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. Throughout her decades on the court, she was the decisive vote on abortion cases, and she always voted to continue to slaughter babies. Of course, she may not have become the sort of Supreme Court justice Reagan wanted, but he was responsible for her appointment. It was a terrible mistake which cost millions of lives.

I liked Ronald Reagan, I believe he was a good man and one of our better presidents. But he was as human as I am, and we humans fail constantly. I am not looking for a new Reagan, I’m looking for the return of Christ. When he returns, he’ll make even the best parts of the Reagan legacy look pretty pitiful by comparison, and perhaps my efforts will look pretty pitiful too. Even so, amen.

IT USED TO BE A FREE COUNTRY

As I predicted in a May 4, 2006 post called “Another Gift From the Clintons”, the food police are back, with a vengeance. Yesterday the press gleefully reported that the Kellogg cereal company has seen the light. They have agreed to reformulate or discontinue most of their products in order to avert a lawsuit threatened by the Center for Science and the Public Interest. They have also agreed to stop advertising anything the CSPI disapproves of to children.

Good nutrition is a good thing, I don’t want my kids to gorge themselves on Cocoa Puffs and Pop Tarts, and I don’t eat breakfast cereal at all. So what is there to be unhappy about?

First of all, breakfast choices should be made by parents, who should be teaching their children not to want everything they see on TV. But the CSPI doesn’t trust parents, and they abhor the forces of the free market, which ought to determine what Kellogg sells.

The CSPI doesn’t trust the legislative process either. This would be far less offensive if this were the result of Congressional action which the public has lobbied for. The old leftist slogan “power to the people” has been replaced by “you’ll hear from our lawyers, and defending yourself will be very, very expensive.” Increasingly in our society, the many are being bullied by the few, and the media calls it progress.

To get an idea how ridiculously tyranical these people are, consider the following quotes:

“Our basic ‘rule-of-thumb’ at the Center is ‘if it’s tasty it’s nasty,’” said Bonnie Liebman, nutrition director of CSPI. “If you insist on eating at a Chinese restaurant we recommend you skimp on the meat and skip the sauces. Try a plate of plain brown rice and a little tofu. It’s on the unpalatable side, but that’s good. You won’t be tempted to overeat.”

Limiting your diet to plain brown rice and tofu will tempt you never to eat again, and that’s their goal. Imagine if that’s all you could buy at the grocery store, because that’s all Bonnie Liebman wants you to have. Bonnie knows best, so wave that white flag, while you still have the energy to do so. Not content with plain brown rice and tofu, she goes on:

“We’re not singling out any ethnic food,” Liebman said. “They’re probably all bad. We just haven’t gotten around to all of them yet.”

Now you know how Bonnie keeps herself busy, touring Italian and Mexican restaurants and trying boxes of Hostess Twinkies to make sure they’re bad for us. I look forward to hearing from her again.

To be fair, I should acknowledge that I’m carrying around a bit of extra weight, and it might shorten my life somewhat. Feel free to write on my tombstone, “He chose to live briefly as a free man, instead of dying after a long, unpleasant period of slavery.”

My real concern, of course, is not about food. My real concern is that we are pretending to be a free nation, while we are in fact surrendering to so many restrictions which neither the public or its representatives have agreed to. For example, my wife and I were compelled, not asked, to join a homeowner’s association when we bought our house. For about $50 a month, the homeowner’s association provides us absolutely no services, no swimming pool, no clubhouse, no grounds maintenance, nothing whatsoever. What do we get from the association for $600 a year? We occasionally get threatening letters from lawyers about something on our property which we haven’t been able to take care of yet, or the fact that we’re falling behind on our protection payments. It used to be a free country, but we have replaced Jonathan Edwards with John Edwards.

MY INSOMNIA TRILOGY

I am very tired tonight, but I can’t sleep. I haven’t written anything new for this blog for nearly a month, and that’s way too long. So here are some brief thoughts about three things which have gotten my attention in recent weeks.

I read recently that the Bush administration plans to allow 7,000 Iraqis to become permanent residents of the United States, because they have helped Americans in Iraq, and it’s too dangerous for them to stay in their homeland. That story is on the back pages of the newspapers now, but it’s going to get a lot more attention, because my prediction is that these 7,000 are just the beginning. Though I supported it, I remember that allowing people from southeast Asia to come to the U.S. was initially very controversial in the 1970s. With all of the uproar over illegal immigration, Americans may just yawn about this, but I suspect there will be some opposition, the usual ineffective opposition which doesn’t prevent the powers that be from doing what they have decided to do.

Congratulations to Iraqis who have helped Americans, but removing the best people from the insane Middle East is not my recipe for an improved world, nor am I delighted to take on another huge community of Moslems, some of whom may have questionable motives. I don’t know how well things are going on the ground in Iraq, but it’s not a good sign when we’re accepting refugees before we have even withdrawn any troops.

Can there be any possible justification for a war on terrorists in the Middle East while our borders remain wide open to terrorists and drug smugglers? Does anyone believe a government which passes immigration legislation and then refuses to enforce it would enforce the next bill either? There is a profound difference between being a nation of legal immigrants who immigrate legally, retain some of their culture, but transfer their loyalty to the United States, and a nation filled with illegal immigrants, many of whom have no desire to become part of American society. We have MS-13 gangs in at least 235 American cities, importing drugs and violent crimes. We have approximately 10 million Social Security numbers which are being fraudulently used, including many by illegals, and our elected officials lay awake at night, trying to come up with ways to reward this behavior. Our immigration system is broken, but it wasn’t broken by Americans. Apparently Americans won’t be allowed to fix it either.

Here’s another thought related to the subject of immigration. Back in 1971, John Lennon recorded a song called “Imagine”, in which he imagined the world would be a better place without God, country and private property. Ironically, the song helped him continue to amass a personal fortune, which he never was willing to part with, but I’ll ignore that for now. The song “Imagine” is still what animates the left today. Hillary Clinton recently condemned President Bush’s “ownership society”, prefering instead a society where all wealth is redistributed by the government.

Even so, John Lennon could not have imagined how his legacy continues to carry the left forward. Recently, the Fox News Network aired a discussion between Bill O’reilly and Jeraldo Rivera about illegal immigration. O’reilly asked Rivera, “Shouldn’t we deport criminal illegal aliens?” Rivera responded, “John Lennon was a criminal illegal alien.”

The comparison is a very poor one, because John Lennon did not sneak into the country. He was never in the United States illegally, and he applied for legal permanent residence. Certainly he was not brought into the country under harsh conditions by British coyotes who had dreams of reconquista for the red coats and the queen. He was not smuggled into the country to do jobs Americans won’t do, for a minimum wage which he could send back to England. The Nixon administration tried to have Lennon deported because of a prior conviction for marijuana possession, and because John Lennon’s song “Cold Turkey” was about his efforts to quit using heroin. President Nixon figured that if Lennon hadn’t obeyed our laws before he came here, he probably wouldn’t obey them if
we allowed him to become a permanent resident. Ironically, if Richard Nixon had gotten his way, John Lennon might still be alive today.

According to Jeraldo Rivera, we shouldn’t deport illegal immigrants because we didn’t deport John Lennon. We shouldn’t deport them, even if they commit murders, rapes, robberies, and they molest children, things John Lennon never did. We should surrender our national sovereignty, because John Lennon smoked a few joints. In the depths of reefer madness, John Lennon couldn’t have imagined that he was taking a giant step toward re-Mexicanizing the United States.

I mention that so I can make the obvious point that Jeraldo Rivera’s ethnic loyalty is much deeper than any loyalty he feels toward the United States. There’s no other reason he would make such a ridiculous argument. Furthermore, the Fox News Channel is so dedicated to being fair and balanced that they find it necessary to give a microphone to both Americans and American traitors. I don’t find it necessary, or even desirable, for the air waves to belong exclusively to flag-waving superpatriots. But how can any network justify keeping someone on the air who lacks even a basic concern about the safety of our citizens? Jeraldo Rivera is just as empty as the vault of Al Capone’s he tried to open years ago, and I have changed channels every time I’ve seen him on TV for many years.

Now, onto my second subject. It has often been observed that people who oppose abortion often favor capital punishment. More importantly, most who favor abortion oppose capital punishment. Right now there is a big move on the left to do away with capital punishment on the grounds that even lethal injections are cruel and unusual, or they may be poorly administered, causing inappropriate suffering to convicted murderers, rapists, kidnappers, or anyone whose lawlessness the A.C.L.U. is fond of. Ironically, these same people are horrified that some want to put an end to the continuing barbarism of injecting poison into the hearts of fully developed babies or puncturing their skulls so their brains can be sucked out. According to the left, this is the fundamental constitutional right of women, women are unhealthy if they can’t do this, and this practice can’t possibly be cruel, unusual or painful to those who haven’t developed language skills yet.

Cat Stevens once said, “Come and join the left. It’s not so far from you.” But he lied when he said it. The left is very, very far from me. I hate what they stand for, and I love what they can’t stand for.

Finally, a word of congratulations to conservative talk show host Michael Gallagher. Mike Gallagher has probably the smallest of all radio empires among the Salem Broadcasting crowd, so much so that he’s on the air here locally between midnight and 4 a.m. I don’t even listen to him very often when I can’t sleep. But he did something awesome last week, and he wrote a column about it dated June 8, which appears on the townhall.com web site. What he did, or actually didn’t do, is that he refused to interview a British author named Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens has written a bestselling book called “God is not Great”. Mike Gallagher has correctly figured out that it is Christopher Hitchens who is not great.

Among other things, Hitchens claims to be an atheist, and he writes that the Bible, and the Old Testament in particular, is a wicked document. He has gotten a lot of publicity for his book, even from conservatives like Hugh Hewitt, who disagrees with him, but likes him because he supports the war on terror. Supporting the war on terror is supposed to make everything else excusable. I read part of a transcript of a so-called debate with Mr. Hitchens on Hugh Hewitt’s show, but I didn’t read it all, because I felt very frustrated that his opponent didn’t challenge the obvious errors in the “God is not Great” book.

Mr. Hitchens argues that the Bible is wicked because it contains violence, an odd concern from someone who supports bombing everything in the Middle East, probably including Israel. The argument is that the God of the Bible cannot be great because he himself sometimes destroys people in both the Old and New Testaments. According to Hitchens, the God of the Bible would be wicked, if he existed.

The vast majority of the violence in the Bible is instigated by men, not by God. As for divine violence, I can only say that I wish there were more of it. This generation desperately needs one good Ananias and Saphira moment, a moment when God’s wrath is clearly and unmistakably shown to mankind. Of course, I don’t want to be the victim, and I don’t wish that sort of victimhood on anyone in particular. However, I do ask myself from time to time why Hugh Hefner has been allowed to live into his 80s. Wouldn’t society have benefited if God had wiped out Hefner and Larry Flint long ago in a dramatic display of divine judgment? We Americans are suffering from a lack of clearly divine retribution, not too much of it. The so-called wicked God of the Bible is more merciful than any of us, and we ought to thank him for it.

By the way, I read recently that by the end of the year the most popular name for baby boys in Great Britain will be one of the 14 variations on the name Mohammed. Christian England, who sent us the pilgrims and populated the 13 colonies with devout Protestants and Catholics is gradually becoming a Moslem nation. We can’t be smug about it, because we may be next. The important point is that secular societies usually don’t survive very long. What really happens over time is that nations change their gods. Sometimes they adopt the God of the Bible, and sometimes they adopt other gods. If Christopher Hitchens thinks the God of the Bible is cruel and capricious, he’ll be far more alarmed by Allah. Allah is the god of beheaders and throat cutters.

Aside from personal issues which I can’t discuss here, those are some of the issues which keep me awake at night.

“I” BEFORE “E” EXCEPT AFTER “C”

Most people use spell checkers because they were taught falsehoods in English class. But since I don’t like bending or breaking rules, I offer the following observation.

I met my nieghbor on a sliegh ride just before Christmas last year. He has an unusual interest in anceint sceince, and he spends most of his time traveling to foriegn lands where despots riegn over women who wear viels. He has to travel light, because some airlines have wieght restrictions about the frieght they can ship. He’s an epileptic, but he hasn’t had a siezure for several years.

Always follow the rules and don’t argue with English teachers. But laugh at them inwardly, because they’re not sceintists.

MY DESPERATELY UNHAPPY MARRIAGE

My wife and I are doing fine. This is about another sort of marriage. About twenty years ago, when I was still single, I was living in an apartment complex on the boundary between Denver and Aurora, CO. Directly above me was a neighbor who loved to party on weekends. Particularly on Friday night, he would crank up the volume of his stereo so loud that the burners on my stove would shake and rattle as if we were having an earthquake. I didn’t know my neighbor, and I wasn’t certain how a request from me to turn the volume down would be received, if I made it personally. I didn’t want to call the police, because I suspected they had better things to do, and they might get an even more rebellious response than I would. So I called a switchboard at the apartment complex and asked a live person who worked for an answering service if they would send a security guard to speak to my neighbor. But week after week, the parties continued uninterrupted. I should have called the police, but I really didn’t want to bother them about my neighbor depriving me of sleep. So I would sometimes call a taxi and go to an all-night restaurant, have breakfast, and return home at about 3 a.m. when my neighbor was finally tired enough to go to sleep. When I got tired of doing that, and I got a better job, I moved to a different apartment.

I haven’t been to a live concert in about fifteen years, because the music is even louder, and I usually have the misfortune of sitting in front of the biggest jerk in the audience. On Friday, August 13, 1982, I went by myself to a concert at Red Rocks (west of Denver) featuring Emmylou Harris and Michael Martin Murphey. It wasn’t unusually loud by concert standards, but what I remember most about it was the guy behind me. Emmylou Harris once recorded a song called “Two More Bottles of Wine”. It was clearly this jerk’s favorite song, because he kept screaming “Sing two more bottles” during her entire performance, making the show rather unenjoyable. Near the end of the show, much to my relief, she finally sang the song. By the way, I was in the fourth row, and I’m sure she could hear him. As soon as she finished, he began screaming, “Sing it again, sing two more bottles.” I haven’t seen Emmylou since, and it’s not her fault.

On another occasion, I went with a friend to a Phil Keaggy concert. For the uninitiated, Phil Keaggy is a Christian guitarist, who plays at a level similar to Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and other rock luminaries. He is the best musician I’ve ever seen live. He has done a lot of Christian rock, as well as several fabulous acoustic albums. His performance that night was so loud that I could barely hear my friend say, “Look at the bright side. You’ll never hear anyone criticize you again.” But above the din of the concert, I could hear the guy behind me screaming, “Crank it up, crank it up.” We have all had the unhappy experience of being stuck in traffic beside someone whose boom box can be heard for half a mile. They all listen to the same sort of music, and let’s just say it’s not Lawrence Welk. Perhaps a little Floyd Cramer blasted really loud wouldn’t be quite as irritating.

I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago when I read an article about a conflict between a church in Massillon, Ohio and the church’s neighbors. One of the so-called unchurched victims was quoted as saying, “They have a heck of a sound system over there. During the services, my windows rattle and my whole house shakes.” Unlike me, he has called the police, and the dispute is ongoing. The pastor of the church was quoted as saying, “No one is going to prevent us from worshiping.” Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor the desire to be a good neighbor will dissuade his congregation from getting down and cranking it up.

Last Sunday was Mother’s Day, and I carried a bottle of water into our Sunday morning church service. As soon as we walked inside, my water bottle began vibrating just like my burners in Denver used to do. At least it wasn’t the middle of the night, and the school where we meet isn’t close enough to anyone’s house for anyone to complain.

This is the sixth church we have attended in and around Phoenix in six years (though we only visited three of them once), and the “crank it up” people are running every one of them. There is a really good justification for some amplification. It’s perfectly OK for someone to speak into a microphone so everyone can hear. Most of us can’t speak naturally loud enough to be heard by a very large audience. Music should be amplified enough so everyone in the audience can hear. But it shouldn’t be so loud that you could sing along in the parking lot. The primary reason why churches are so loud, aside from the desire to advertise their worship to the outside world, is because drums are a standard part of church bands. Once you bring in a set of drums, everything else has to be amplified to compete with the drums. Every church service I’ve attended for several years has been at a volume level which my home television cannot produce, though our current TV might come close to it.

I have spoken to several pastors about this issue, but not our current one, because I’ve given up. The usual answer I get is some variation of “We believe worship is important, and we want to worship in a contemporary way which is popular with this generation, whether you personally like it or not.” I don’t object to dancing or shouting, unless someone is shouting into an amplifier. Perhaps I could live with the same repetitious six or seven songs played week after week, if they were played at a reasonable volume level. But the noise of the culture around us has reached an unbearable level, and the noisiest part of my week is always Sunday morning.

I am in a desperately unhappy marriage with organized religion. On one hand, the marriage is necessary, because I respect the scripture which implores Christians to gather together. Staying at home on Sunday, collecting milk bottles, or whatever I might do instead, just isn’t satisfactory for me, it would be an enormous waste of time, it wouldn’t set a good example for my kids, and it would be unproflitable for others. Nevertheless, I don’t enjoy going to church, and I haven’t for some time. I don’t invite people to church, because I simply don’t believe what goes on in all the churches I’m familiar with is normal or necessary. Yet I feel as if I’m trapped in a marriage with a spouse whose spending I can’t control. Every time I get fed up with the church we attend, my wife says she doesn’t want to start over, the next church will be the same, and she’s right. So we stay, and I marvel at the fact that I can’t even find a small group of Christians who care how I feel. I’ve thought about starting a house church of my own, but I’m probably the only one who would like it. So I am stuck in my desperately unhappy marriage, with no way to enjoy the marriage and no justification for a divorce.

THIEF ON THE CROSS

All four gospels say that Jesus was crucified between two thieves. Neither Mark nor John give us any additional information about the two thieves, and Matthew says they both joined the chief priests in mocking and ridiculing Jesus, as he was dying. Only in Luke 23:39-43 do we find an account which says that one of the thieves repented and asked Jesus to remember him in paradise. If one believes both Matthew’s and Luke’s versions, repentance for this man must have come in mid-crucifixion, not at the beginning.

Now fast forward to May 9, 2007, where a condemned man named Philip Workman was executed by the state of Tennessee for the murder of a Memphis policeman named Ron Oliver in 1981 during the robbery of a Wendy’s restaurant. The robbery was supposed to help Workman get money for his drug habit. Later, in prison, Philip Workman claimed to be a changed man. He committed his spirit to Jesus Christ just before he was given the lethal injection which ended his life.

I’m familiar with this case because I lived in Nashville for two years, during which Workman’s lawyers were filing appeals, appealing both his death penalty and his conviction. He claimed Ron Oliver was actually shot accidentally by another policeman, not by Workman, though he acknowledged the 1981 Wendy’s robbery, and he acknowledged shooting at police during the robbery. I don’t know how long he advanced the “it wasn’t my bullet” theory, nor do I know when he claimed to have become a Christian. Both claims go back at least as far as 1999 when I moved to Nashville.

Just for the sake of argument, I’m going to accept both of his claims, though many people may not accept either of them. I actually believe his conversion to Christianity was probably genuine, but I wonder if it was as genuine as it should have been. Whether he fired the fatal shot or not, it was clearly his fault that Ron Oliver is no longer with us. I don’t know anything about Ron Oliver’s family, but most policemen have spouses and families, and my assumption is that this robbery not only caused the officer’s death, but it created a widow, orphans, and many other grieving family members and friends, who have no court to which they can appeal.

I mentioned the thief on the cross at the beginning, because it seems to me that his repentance was much deeper than Philip Workman’s. I suspect he was crucified less than a week after his crime, and quite possibly the next day. It’s worth noting that he asked Jesus to “remember me when you come in your kingly glory”. He did not say, “Jesus, get me off this cross and let me go about my business. I have repented and I am no longer a danger to society. Surely you can see that. Besides, it would be really impressive if you did one last miracle.” That’s probably what Philip Workman would have said. Workman and
his legal team filed appeals for 26 years, and they caused Ron Oliver’s family and friends to wait an entire generation for justice, and I suspect Philip Workman’s legal bills were paid by the taxpayers of Tennessee, and I used to be one of them.

I get no joy from Philip Workman’s death. Perhaps he had become a harmless human being, and perhaps I might spend eternity with him. But repentance, first and foremost, means taking responsibility for one’s own actions and facing the consequences for them. It doesn’t mean hiring the best possible lawyers, it doesn’t mean blaming others. Repentance doesn’t claim an unhappy childhood, it doesn’t blame addiction, it doesn’t blame a chemical imbalance in the brain or the wrong medications, and it doesn’t even blame the devil for the inspiration of evil. In fact, the fruit of real repentance is found in Luke 19:8:

“So then Zacchaeus stood up and solemnly declared to the Lord, See, Lord, the half of my goods I [now] give [by way of restoration] to the poor, and if I have cheated anyone out of anything, I [now] restore four times as much.”

That sort of repentance is desperately needed in our society today. It’s needed in our churches. It’s needed among our celebrities and our athletes. It’s needed in the media and on college campuses. It’s needed in business and it’s needed by labor. It’s needed by every race, by both genders, by the rich and the poor. It’s badly needed in both political parties, which are full of people seeking power for themselves, instead of pursuing peace with friend and foe alike, while they serve the nation. Many of our political leaders are on a binge of self-promotion, blaming their political opponents even for the weather. Our lack of repentance has reached such grotesque proportions that most states have felt compelled to pass laws allowing mothers to abandon their babies at hospitals, fire and police stations, or churches. We’ve built bureaucracies to try to compel fathers to pay for the support of children they conceived, whether or not they have any access to those children. We want our news to be “fair and balanced” instead of true, and our news is hardly ever the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I could go on and on and on. But I won’t, because most people would just read it and think I’m talking about someone else. But the most important thing about repentance is that it first looks in the mirror. Only later does it look at someone else. My job is to figure out what I can do better, and I hope whoever reads this will look in the mirror and ask themselves what they can do better.

BEWARE THE BUILDING FUND

About twenty years ago, I was living in the Denver area, I was still single, and I was searching for a church to attend. I looked in the phone book and picked a church I thought I might try. Since I can’t see, I called a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the address which was listed in the phone book.

When we arrived at the location, the driver informed me that nothing was there, except a vacant lot. I was going to ask him to take me home, but he called the dispatcher and asked where this church was. The dispatcher gave him a different address, and the driver took me there and dropped me off.

Once the service began, someone behind the pulpit began talking excitedly about the church’s new building, and I realized the address in the phone book was merely a faith address. I had more faith in the phone book than I should have.

The first item in the service was a special offering for the comfortable new theater chairs which were going to eventually be at their faith address. Each theater seat would cost $77, which is probably cheap by today’s standards. Since this was God’s work and God wants to grow his church, we shouldn’t just buy a chair for ourselves. We should buy ten chairs, so our unsaved friends could join us at the new faith address, and some of us could afford more than ten chairs. You can’t outgive God.

But it’s OK to send God’s people to a vacant lot. So I sat through the service, thinking about my taxi ride to nowhere and my obligation for at least $770. It occurred to me that I didn’t have to come back, and I never did. However, the new church was built, and I was later informed by one of its members that the theater seats are very nice.

Two or three years later, I met the woman who is now my wife at another Denver area church. The church was renting a meeting room in a local hotel, which was most unsatisfactory, because of the need to set up chairs every week, to bring in instruments and amplifiers, as well as putting the chairs away and removing the equipment after the service. The pastor wanted a building, and they eventually purchased one.

As everyone knows, the three most important things about a church building are location, location and location. But all the good locations were taken, and we wound up in a bad location, in a building no one would pass accidentally. The building hadn’t even been open for two months when the pastor decided to leave Colorado to go pastor a church in Oregon. The church got a new pastor. The new pastor hated the building, but he was stuck with it. The congregation was mostly single people looking for spouses, and the new pastor felt the church was too social and recreational, and not spiritual enough. So he didn’t mind very much when the single people left, because he wanted families. But no families came, and the declining attendance made it impossible to repay
the loan for the building. The new pastor left, the building was sold, and the congregation scattered. The church had other problems, but the building itself was an integral part of the church’s collapse.

A decade later, my wife and I found ourselves in metropolitan Phoenix, attending a church which wanted to expand its existing facilities. They bought some adjacent land and began a do-it-yourself project, building a new building for the church, as well as a school and classrooms. During the building project, many things the church would normally have done went without workers, including the children’s programs which my wife was responsible for. Before the building was complete, she decided she had had enough. She resigned, and we went looking for another church. One of the men who did a lot of work on the building was employed by the church. He often worked 16-hour days, and his wife was so frustrated by the end of the project that she wrote a twelve-page letter to the pastors detailing her complaints, and her family left Arizona. It didn’t help that this woman was my wife’s best friend there, and they babysat for each other.

So when it came time to choose another church, I wanted to go somewhere where I at least knew somebody, and I knew another pastor and his wife. So we changed churches. As soon as we did, the word went forth that they too need a new building. They are currently trying to borrow $2.4 million to purchase land for a facility which is supposed to cost approximately an additional $5.6 million. All $8 million would be borrowed money, and the facility may actually cost much more than $5.6 million, because building costs are skyrocketing, and the interest payments on the loans may double, triple or quadruple the real cost of this project.

The current membership of the church includes only 75 to 80 adults. Assuming 80 adults and an $8 million figure, and considering that my wife and I are two of the 80 adults, our fair share of this project would be approximately $200,000, which is more than we purchased our house for five years ago. I don’t mind being generous, but you know what they say about blood and turnips. As a matter of fairness, I acknowledge that the planning and the desire for this project predates our membership. But I don’t think the question, “Do the 80 of you want to owe $8 million?” has been asked often enough. Church members are the only people who can pay this bill, and it would be a lot of money even if the congregation were ten times as large.

Church attendance in the United States is relatively flat. In other words, most church growth comes at the expense of other churches. Of course, we don’t live in a stagnant world. The size of the congregation may change. This is God’s work after all, and the assumption is for growth. Bankers are generally not faith people, however, and they make assumptions based on current realities. Bankers like to lend money, because they are more keenly aware than most pastors are of the reality behind the Bible’s admonition:

Proverbs 22:7 “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”

Church leaders say they have heard from God about this, and I hope so. But it may be that God’s counsel on this subject is found in the following passage:

Romans 13:8 “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.”

I hope they get their building. I say they, because I’m not sure I want to be around for the duration of this project. Like ordinary citizens, churches have bills to pay. We are already being asked to give special offerings, beyond tithes, to support this project, which is still in its early stages. I trust the pastor not to want to put any undue pressure on people. But when the bills come due, and a lot of money is needed from a small group of people, there will be a tendency to beg more than usual for donations, and it will change the personality of the church.

The desire to acquire facilities tends to turn organized religion into a business, and I think there’s a better way of doing things. Early Christians were expelled from synagogues, and the New Testament says nothing about church buildings. All of the New Testament references to churches appear to be with regard to house churches, where Christians opened up their homes to each other. Many churches have home groups, and the home groups are the only places where people can really get acquainted and develop friendships, something which is nearly impossible in traditional Sunday morning church settings. Traditional churches regard home groups as supplemental. But I think house churches are the real church, and the traditional church is supplemental. Christians really need a cultural change, because the current culture isn’t serving us well.

I’m sure there are a million home group horror stories out there too, but I would feel much more comfortable expressing my opinion among a small circle of friends than I do speaking up as the lone dissenter in a large or medium-sized church. The issue for me is that I really want my voice to be heard about issues like this one, which tends not to happen in larger churches, yet I don’t want to create a perception that I’m leading a one-man mutiny. It would be nice to have a little more input about these decisions, but the train is already chugging down the track, and it isn’t going to turn avound for me.

I’M OK, YOU’RE OK, AND YOUR EXPLOSIVES ARE OK

Last week, I lamented the notion that guilty white liberalism has showered love on the cruelest among us. I noted that Cornell had a memorial service for the Virginia Tech victims, at which the president of Cornell said,

“We are one.” “We are one community, one people, one planet. We are here today to affirm that oneness … We are here to bear witness to the passing of the 33 members of our family at Virginia Tech University who have met an untimely and terrible fate.” “We are here for all of those who are gone, for all 33. We are here for the 32 who have passed from the immediate to another place, not by their own choice. We are also here for the one who has also passed.”

In effect, the memorial service was just as much for the murderer as it was for the murdered.

Unfortunately, this moral confusion is not confined to Cornell. An article in the “Oklahoman” indicates that Oklahoma University has set up a memorial stone for Joel Henry Henrichs, the man who detonated a bomb outside the football stadium during an OU football game in 2005. Because Henrichs only killed himself, the university has taken the public position that his death was a suicide, not an attempt to harm others. That’s the assumption the university is most comfortable with, and it can’t be disproven.

However, given that the student was a Moslem, suicide bombers are in the news nearly every day, and suicide in this manner, without intentionally destroying other victims is extremely rare–perhaps non-existent, it would be equally reasonable to assume the bomb detonated prematurely. I acknowledge that the terrorism theory also can’t be proven, but it’s an awfully good guess that this man intended to kill as many of the university’s football fans, students, alumni, and perhaps players and coaches as possible.

Yet the university has honored him with a memorial stone near the student union building, at taxpayer expense. This was provided by the Student Affairs Division (SAD, for short, how appropriate). I wonder if Bud Wilkinson and Billy Vessels, who actually did something for the university, have been so honored. Perhaps they have. If this was a suicide, it’s still true that the university is honoring someone who violently dishonored himself, and that’s inappropriate, unless they want to encourage other university students to similarly destroy themselves. I’m sure that many OU students graduate and live as good citizens without being honored by the university in a similar way.

On the other hand, if this man intended to destroy as many other people as possible, memorializing him in any way is inexcusable. To be fair, I don’t think any reasonable person can say with certainty what Joel Henry Henrichs intended to do on the day he died. Please note, therefore, how absolutely certain OU president David Boren is about what happened that day. The following is his response to the article in the “Oklahoman” about this memorial.

“I am deeply disappointed by a media report that could lead to the revival of unfounded rumors about an OU student’s apparent suicide more than a year and a half ago. Our society is not well served by encouraging insensitivity or by raising unnecessary levels of fear in the broader community.”

Note the tone. In effect, he is saying, “This was so long ago. We’re certain he meant no harm to others. You’re being insensitive, and you’re causing fear and inciting hate in the community.” May I respectfully suggest that he might want to be a little more concerned about the fear bombs detonated outside his stadium cause. Perhaps he could also try being a little less certain about what a dead man’s motives used to be. I freely acknowledge that I’m not certain, but what he says sound like DENIAL, and he goes on:

“We need to encourage understanding and compassion in our society instead of more anger and intolerance based upon misinformation. What kind of people would we be if we refused to allow a grieving family the right to remember their deceased son or brother? Of course, if there had been any evidence that he was attempting to harm others our decision would have been different, but there was none.”

It is at least possible that this man never went inside the stadium, because he didn’t think he could get his bomb past security. I’m not saying that’s what happened. I wouldn’t dare say it, because then I would be guilty of anger, intolerance and insensitivity. Mr. Boren continues:

“No evidence was ever found to indicate that the deceased ever attempted to enter our stadium or ever intended to do so nor was there a single shred of evidence to link him to terrorist groups. There was never any evidence developed to sustain any theory other than suicide in the very thorough briefings provided to me by law enforcement regarding the situation.

I regret that the news story may have left the impression that the student’s death was anything other than a suicide.”

Perhaps he’s right, and perhaps I should ignore the portion of the article in the “Oklahoman” which says:

“FBI agents said they do not know if the student intentionally set off the bomb on the bench as a suicide or if he also had intended to kill others elsewhere. A Norman police bomb expert has said he believes the bomb went off accidentally and that the student had further plans.”

You just can’t trust police bomb experts. Perhaps they’re filled with anger, insensitivity, intolerance, and an overwhelming desire to misinform us. Perhaps they’re unintentionally wrong, or perhaps they’re right. Here’s one final quote from David Boren:

“The University did not erect a monument in honor of this student. The pavers are placed there by those who purchase them for a charge of $150 per stone, in this case the son’s father, and the proceeds go toward the upkeep of the student union. We are very proud of the fact that members of our university family are sensitive and compassionate to family members impacted by this student’s death.”

I’m just as fond of sensitivity, compassion and fudge sundaes as the next guy, but I am a bit confused by the contradiction between his statement that the university did not provide this monument and the article in the “Oklahoman”, which states that Mr. Henrichs’ father asked to pay for the memorial, but he was never billed for it, and he never knew it actually existed until the newspaper informed him about it. Perhaps someone is lying, or perhaps someone’s memory or knowledge is inaccurate. But the bottom line for me is that I’m not sure any university should have a “get a bomb and get a plaque” program, and I suspect that most of the insensitive citizens of Oklahoma would prefer not to have a memorial stone for a campus bomber at all, no matter who paid for it. People with bombs are not heroes, especially not in Oklahoma. Our brethren at Cornell and Oklahoma University would do us all a favor if they would confine their sensitivity and compassion to students who haven’t killed anyone on school property.

I EXPECT TO DIE IN JAIL

Relax, and take a deep breath. I am not planning a crime spree. I don’t even intend to steal a nickel from anyone. Yet I believe I’m headed for handcuffs and a future incarceration, and here’s why.

Every generation is motivated primarily by something. The men and women we sometimes refer to as the greatest generation were motivated by a desire to destroy the militaristic tyrany of Germany and Japan. I don’t mean that everyone in that generation woke up every morning asking themselves, “What can I do to the Germans and the Japs today?” Of course, they didn’t. But when they were called on to face those enemies, they did so in industries and personal sacrifice at home, and they did so on the beaches of Normandy and throughout the South Pacific. It may not have been what they lived for every moment, and it certainly wasn’t pleasant, but millions of young men risked their lives for the goal anyway. It goes without saying that baby boomers and their descendants, by and large, have never shared the goals of the greatest generation.

What motivates this generation? It’s not peace, or civil rights, or an end to global warming. Those things would be nice, but this generation’s goal is more personal. More than anything else, this generation’s goal is sexual freedom. I don’t mean by that that everyone is sleeping with everyone. Only a hedonistic minority of us want to do that. Bob Dylan said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The winds of change have indeed been blowing in the post-World War II era, and the biggest changes in society have come from the “get the government out of my bedroom” crowd. Even Paul Harvey supports abortion, because he says he doesn’t want doctors and mothers-to-be who don’t want their babies punished.

The most powerful political lobbies in the United States today are the pro-abortion lobby and the homosexual lobby. No industry, not the oil companies, the computer industry, airlines, the auto industry, or anyone else has anything comparable. Nothing is so fiercely fought for these days as sexual freedom, or perhaps I should say, sex without consequences. Nothing has driven the political machinery for change as much as the desire for the availability for contraceptives, even given to minors without the knowledge or consent of their parents, no fault divorce, abortion, and the distribution of hard and soft pornography everywhere, including on the public air waves. I was on a public bus the other day, and the bus driver had the radio tuned to someone singing, “Do you think I’m a nasty girl?” Not so long ago, being a nasty girl in public would have been very uncool, and it would have been considered unprofessional to listen to music like that on the job, even if one had a private collection of erotic music. But these days, our celebritys have made being nasty girls and boys in public so commonplace that it’s just plain boring.

No matter where the reader may be in the political spectrum, if I say the three words, “women’s reproductive health”, the reader will certainly think of Planned Parenthood, NARAL, or some other pro-abortion group. The primary mission of those groups is parenthood prevention, and they speak about women’s reproductive health as if having a child were similar to bubonic plague in the Middle Ages. This is so true that last week’s Supreme Court decision opposing partial birth abortion was condemned by the American Council of Obstretricians and Gynecologists. One might instinctively suppose that a group of obstetricians would be jubilant about the possibility of a few more children they could care for, but birth prevention is more important to them than childbirth. To understand how odd this is, one has to picture a group of dairymen marching on Washington to protest the existence of too many cattle.

There is a drive for tolerance of all sexual practices and alternate family structures, and acceptance which is stridently demanded for homosexuality. Though it’s my least favorite subject in the world, and I would hope to never write about it again, I want to declare my opposition to the acceptance of homosexuality, and it is that opposition which I believe will eventually lead to a knock on my door, a ride in the back of a cruiser, the legal procedures of the coming era, and what convicts call hard time.

Before I explained why I really believe this is a possibility and why I’m determined to carry my cross, wherever it leads, I want to say in passing that I am not at all supportive of the Westboro Baptist church, whose members show up at funerals to celebrate the deaths of our servicemen and who wanted to be at the funerals of the Virginia Tech victims, celebrating the massacre, because our society is too tolerant of homosexuality. Applauding the deaths of our soldiers and the murder of our students, for any reason, is disgusting and shameful.

My opposition to homosexuality did not originate in the Bible, nor was it the result of a personal experience. It began in a discussion I had with a liberal friend, who told me early in 1971 that the gay rights movement would be the next great civil rights struggle. She endorsed the notion of public acceptance of homosexuality, gay marriage, etc., on the grounds of the supposed genetic cause for homosexuality. I countered by saying that society has never opposed homosexual thoughts or temptation, but only homosexual behavior. If homosexual behavior is genetically preprogrammed into us, I argued that bank robbery and even child molestation might be too. I didn’t and still don’t believe homosexuality has anything to do with genetics. But even if it does, I argued that it’s necessary for society to ban certain behavior and to look on some lifestyles more favorably than others.

I added that homosexuality is both physically and emotionally unnatural, and unlike heterosexuality, which produces the next generation and tends to create stable families, or at least the possibility for them, homosexuality doesn’t benefit society at all, and therefore, it ought to be discouraged. Note that I said homosexuality does not benefit society; I did not say homosexuals don’t benefit society. I want to be clear here that I am speaking about specific behavior, not about individuals. I will continue to listen to the “Nutcracker Suite” and other music by Tchaikovsky, giving him full credit for the music and without worrying he was gay.

Of course, I understand that it’s possible for a gay person to try to be a conscientious parent, yet I remain convinced that the best situation for children is to be raised by a mother and a father who are committed to each other and to the individual child. There are always exceptional circumstances, in which the custody of a child has to be given to a single parent, grandparents, or even to the state in some bleak circumstances. But awarding children to gay couples or gay individuals wouldn’t be high on my list of the best alternatives.

I had most of this discussion with someone when I was seventeen, without ever reading a word of scripture or hearing a sermon about it. I don’t mean to be crude, but there is something inately obvious about the notion that penises are meant for vaginas, and vice versa. Of course, I know that both men and women can give orgasms to members of their own gender, but it is at best an inferior form of sex. Anyone with a bit of common sense understands that men are made for women and women are made for men.

Furthermore, the real reason people should prefer heterosexual relationships to homosexual ones has nothing to do with anyone’s genitals. Men and women need each other, primarily because of their differing and complimentary emotional makeups. I’ve had a few good male friends. But generally speaking, the companionship of women is superior, precisely because women are different than men. If God had brought Adam another man instead of a woman, Adam would have probably said, “Lord, I might go fishing with him, but he’s too much like me. Please try again.” Rosie O’Donnell may not understand the bond between men and women, but that’s because she hangs upside down and calls it therapy. It’s no wonder that everything she says is upside down, backwards, dishonest and vulgar.

We’ve done everything we could for the past two generations to pretend that the natural order of things is for men and women to be at war with each other. How can we fail to realize that men and women are normally very fond of each other, except when we try consciously to prevent it? Back before there was a co-ed military, men from all nations went to war to protect their women and their children, not because they really wanted the rush of power they might get from killing other men. In purely American terms, the men on the beaches of Normandy and the men who marched up the hill at Iwo Jima were thinking a lot more about Rosie the riveter back home than Roosevelt’s vision for the post-war world. Furthermore, I believe that Moslems will never successfully dominate the world, because real men don’t want women to hide their faces, and they don’t want women to be treated like cattle and horses.

Conversely, before feminists began convincing women to put their own interests ahead of their husbands, most women didn’t feel oppressed by men. Sometimes women needed greater opportunities than they had, but most women were content to fulfill different roles than the men in their lives because they were partners. A lot of the reason for the push toward homosexuality is that Hollywood, courts, lawyers and feminists have been trying really hard to create a society where men and women are perpetually angry with each other. That’s not at all normal. It’s contrary to what most of us really want. The natural order of things is for men and women to be really fond of each other. Anything contrary to that is created by evil people with a self-serving agenda.

In August 1973, approximately two and a half years after I became aware of the pro-gay politics which are driving public discourse today, and after a long period of reading and studying, I gave my life to Jesus Christ, and I am convinced of the truth of scripture, including its numerous passages in both the Old and New Testaments which forbid homosexuality. I believe that homosexuality is a sin, not just an alternate lifestyle. It is not a greater sin than heterosexual sex outside of marriage, which many of us have been guilty of at some point in our lives. In fact, there wouldn’t be a gay agenda or any gay pride parades if heterosexuals, in large numbers, had rejected the sexual revolution, which they should have. It’s not hard for me to understand why gays would want to change the playing field in a world which has so casually accepted heterosexual shacking up and hooking up for the past generation.

But here’s what I don’t get. In the worst days of racial segregation, no one could have been prosecuted for just being a segregationist. However, the law was supposed to protect blacks from violence. Perhaps it didn’t always do so, but it was supposed to. Going to an all-white church was never a crime, but firebombing a black church and murdering four girls who were there was always a crime. Segregation lost its foothold in this country because of violence, not really because segregation was a bad idea.

However, there are various hate crimes bills making their way through Congress which will criminalize those of us who continue to say homosexuality is a sin. Those bills will probably be vetoed by President Bush, unless they’re tied to funding for the military, which is quite possible. But in the current political climate, it’s very likely that the next president, Republican or Democrat, will sign legislation which will use a combination of fines and jail time to prevent people from speaking out against the agenda of the homosexual lobby. I believe it will soon be a federal crime to say anything evil about homosexuality from the pulpit or in any public forum, like this one. Those who err in this regard will face the possibility of time in federal prison. The new hate crimes frontier doesn’t depend on advocating violence, or the theft or destruction of personal property. A hate crime will soon be anything which violates society’s will for tolerance of protected groups, most notably homosexuals and abortionists. I know this is a dark and apocalyptic view of the near future, but please take note of the public firestorms which are currently being generated today about anyone who dares to make a politically incorrect comment.

It won’t be necessary for the government to fill the jails with anti-gay pastors and other Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Moslems who disapprove of homosexuality. It will only be necessary to target enough people selectively in order to intimidate the rest of the population. So even though I don’t hate anyone, I cheerfully acknowledge that I have committed what the gay lobby calls hate crimes, and I intend to continue to do so. I am here and now volunteering for the punishment they prescribe, and they’ll find me if I am among the chosen few they decide to persecute and prosecute. I have no fondness for being separated from my family, being fined or losing my career, being jailed or martyrdom. However, I do have some fondness for the great commission, in which Jesus asked his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all I have commanded you.” The word all includes what scripture has to say about sexual sin and this generation’s desire for sexual freedom, or sex without consequences. I was aware when I became a Christian in 1973 that I would be in an escalating conflict with the world around me. I’m not surprised we are heading toward the criminalization of Christianity, I’m only surprised the PC police aren’t here yet. As long as Jesus doesn’t regret shedding his blood for the sins of all mankind, I promise not to regret being one of his disciples.

CAPOTE, COWARDICE AND CORNELL

The 1960s were a very strange and turbulent time, though they almost seem tame by today’s standards. The 60s brought us Andy Warhol, Tiny Tim, Hugh Romney (who was known as Wavy Gravy) and Truman Capote. For me, one of the most shocking moments of the 1960s was when I found out who Truman Capote was.

I remember staying up late one night to watch Capote on the Dick Cavett show, and he was not at all what I expected him to be. Based on reading his book “In Cold Blood”, I expected he would be a sort of Jack Webb poster boy for law and order. Only after he appeared on TV did I realize I had misunderstood his book. I found out later that Capote was famous for his alcoholism and drug abuse, as well as what I observed that night, his whiney effeminite voice (he was as stereotypically gay as anyone I can imagine) and his self-absorbed ego, the ego which kept telling Dick Cavett that “In Cold Blood” was a masterpiece. I kept thinking that most of the people in western Kansas must have been awfully uncomfortable around him, but he became a late night celebrity in the 1960s, and they did not. I walked away from the telecast, wondering if he thought the November 14, 1959 murder of the Clutter family was good for his career. He promoted himself as well as he could, but he seemed unconcerned about the unfortunate Clutters. Knowing who he was made the already considerable sadness of his book doubly depressing.

I also realized that even though he knew on some level that the crime was hideously evil, he had spent a lot of time with the killers and had become fascinated with them. I think he really felt he had more in common with them than he did with their victims. “In Cold Blood” was not overtly merciless, but two-thirds of the book was written from the killers’ point of view. Capote can be partially forgiven, because he spent five years with the killers and he never knew the Clutters. Yet I think the Clutters were part of a world Capote rejected, and the killers were not. In a subtle way, Capote switched sides, befriending the killers and entertaining their demons.

Beyond that, I believe Capote was miserably unhappy, and he wrote the book in order to rationalize his own decadent lifestyle. The Clutters were churchgoing people, and Capote felt that either their God did not exist, or he wasn’t interested in them when they were tied up and shot with their mouths taped, and Mr. Clutter’s throat was cut. Capote reasoned that even if there is a real, personal and loving God, if he wouldn’t help the Clutters, he sure wouldn’t do anything for Truman Capote, who recognized in himself a walking time bomb full of evil.

“In Cold Blood” was supposed to be great writing because it gave us a glimpse into the criminal mind, and ever since its publication, the news media has been trying to put a face on killers so we can understand them. Decades later, this hasn’t enriched any of us, and it has encouraged crime, rather than reducing it. Evil doesn’t deserve our exploration.

Not long after “In Cold Blood” was published, Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses and Charles Whitman climbed the tower at the University of Texas, randomly murdering 15 victims. His crime wasn’t completely random, because he began his crime spree by murdering both his wife and his mother. Borrowing their coverage from Truman Capote’s nightmare, the media began obsessing about Whitman’s brain tumor and anything else which might have made him snap. Charles Whitman is still remembered today, but it would be nearly impossible to find a paragraph about one of his victims.

Since 1966, we have had a seemingly endless series of mass murders, including one at a McDonalds, one at a Luby’s cafeteria, several at post offices, most memorably one in Edmund, Oklahoma. Ironically, the real kings of mass murder, the pseudo-religious Jim Jones and the spoiled army castoff, Tim McVeigh, found more efficient weapons than guns. Then the school shootings began, and everyone remembers Columbine High School. I was living in Littleton, Colorado when it happened.

A pattern from these killings began to emerge. Most of today’s mass murderers never intend to survive and escape. They are cowards, unwilling to face both society’s wrath and the slim possibility that their own consciences might awake and condemn them for their depravity.

Secondly, the media becomes obsessed with the motives of these murderers, wanting to understand them and peek into their minds and find out what drove them mad. The media has virtually no interest in the innocent dead or in the living souls who are physically and emotionally wounded in ways few of us can imagine. Only the psychotic are interesting anymore. I have a simple suggestion for the media, a suggestion I’m confident they won’t listen to. They don’t publish the names of rape victims. There isn’t any law against doing so, it’s just a consensus, and I agree with it. Why not take the same approach to mass murderers? Instead of allowing them to vent their maniacal anger on TV, why not spend all our energy on talking about the survivors and the lives the dead have lost? Instead, the media’s morbid fascination with murderers has fanned the flames of every borderline lunatic in the country, and schools in at least a dozen states have been locked down or have had threats and potential emergencies in the three days since the Virginia Tech massacre. For the voyeuristic press and too much of the public, it’s all a big video game. In a just society, their coverage of the Virginia Tech story this week would make NBC as obsolete as the Studebaker.

Even before the murderer’s corpse begins to decay, the media and some of the survivors begin searching for living people to punish for a crime they supposedly should have anticipated and prevented. I was saddened, but not surprised, this week when people began blaming Virginia Tech University for not anticipating a second crime scene. Perhaps the university should have warned everyone on campus that a killer was on the loose. But there is no way to know what’s in a lunatic’s mind or where he will strike next. We should all remember that the employees at the World Trade Center were told to remain at their desks, and the ones who did so are dead. Any advice the university might have given about what to do, “Stay in your dorms”, “go to class”, “leave campus” may have been precisely wrong, and it might even have given the killer a clue about where to go to inflict the most possible loss of life. I don’t think all of the lawsuits from the Columbine massacre have been settled yet, and the finger-pointing over what happened at Virginia Tech is likely to be worse.

Every time I hear the words Kent State, I think back to May 4, 1970 and the four students who were killed there. I’m sure Kent State has issued many thousands of degrees since then, but Kent State for me brings just one lasting memory. Similarly, when I hear about Texas A&M, I think about the 1999 Aggie bonfire and the lives it cost more often than I think about A&M’s football and basketball teams. On Monday, the image of Virginia Tech was scarred by one man’s depravity, the depravity of the sick and twisted mind of a man whose name I don’t want to remember. Fortunately, I can’t pronounce it anyway.

But I mentioned Cornell instead of Virginia Tech in my title, and here’s why. There was a memorial service for the Virginia Tech victims at Cornell, a memorial service which should offend people everywhere. At that service, Cornell University’s president, David Skorton, invited Cornell’s students to mourn for all 33 victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, including the murderer. Here is what he said.

“We are one.” “We are one community, one people, one planet. We are here today to affirm that oneness … We are here to bear witness to the passing of the 33 members of our family at Virginia Tech University who have met an untimely and terrible fate.” “We are here for all of those who are gone, for all 33. We are here for the 32 who have passed from the immediate to another place, not by their own choice. We are also here for the one who has also passed.”

The Virginia Tech killer may be part of David Skorton’s family, but he is definitely not part of mine. Virginia Tech plans to postumously award degrees to his 32 victims and perhaps Cornell will give 33 honorary degrees, but they shouldn’t. We are not one big happy family. What sort of madness would cause an Ivy League school (I bet Cornell’s tuition isn’t cheap) to have a memorial service which is as much on behalf of a murderer as it was for his victims, and to have the university’s president speak on his behalf?

Even as troubled as he was, on Sunday night I would have agreed that the Virginia Tech killer’s life was as valuable as anyone else’s. But on Monday morning, when he pulled the trigger hundreds of times, shooting his victims repeatedly at close range and probably being soaked by their blood, his madness made him something less than human. Cornell’s president and the mainstream media want me to feel sorry for this monster because he was picked on in school or because he had an unhappy childhood. On Sunday, I would have cared about his pain. All I can think about now is that I would like to give his rotting corpse a good hard kick. But I don’t deserve that opportunity nearly as much as those who have lost children, brothers, sisters, parents or friends. Those people, not this demented jerk, need Cornell’s concern. We were all picked on in school. I was picked on in school. My sons are picked on in school. But very few of us are heartless enough to empty a gun’s bullets into stranger after stranger and keep reloading and reloading. I hope this maggot of a man who murdered 32 innocent human beings is eternally as terrified in hell as his victims were in their final moments on earth. He may not find many people from Virginia Tech down there, but he may have some company from Cornell, and from the mainstream media who have spent the whole week trying to rationalize his behavior and give him a face we should have loved, while at the same time trying to make sure his victims are buried anonymously.

If you meet a Hokie , hug him or her. They need it right now, and they’re going to need it for a long, long time.

LYNCHING DON IMUS

On Monday, one of my leftist co-workers asked me what I thought about the ongoing Don Imus/Rutgers women’s basketball team controversy. As usual, he was up to his neck in ignorance about the subject, since he apparently believed Don Imus is a right-wing blogger with a TV show. He probably doesn’t know where Rutgers is either, which leads to my first point. Why does he care? Why do any of us care?

Mr. Imus made his unfortunate and now infamous about the “nappy-headed hos” on the Rutgers basketball team on April 4. On an average day, approximately 60 people are murdered in the United States, and I assume April 4, 2007 was an average day. Even given the possibility that a few of the victims that day were criminals in their own right, drug dealers, wife beaters, etc., it’s reasonable to suspect that most of them were as innocent as snowflakes and did nothing at all to deserve a horrible end to their lives. Yet none of their tragedies, nor the grief of their families and friends, made the news. I’m opposed to name-calling too, but it doesn’t begin to compare to the tragedies which are taking place in the United States every day.

About two weeks ago, I saw one news story about 3,500 people being laid off by Circuit City, and today Citicorp announced it is laying off 17,000 people. Here we have two stories which will affect more than 20,000 families, but both of them combined will get far less media coverage than one sentence fragment uttered by a grumpy old white man on a TV show few people actually watch. The first thing to understand about the Imus/Rutgers affair is that is a non-story about the media’s fascination with itself.

The second thing which seems odd about the story is that the blood lust for ending the broadcast career of Mr. Imus was being spearheaded by two black men who are misappropriating the term reverend, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I’m not defending what Mr. Imus said about the Rutgers basketball team at all, but real reverends know that grace is needed by the guilty. Grace is completely unnecessary for the innocent. John Newton, who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace” was a slave trader, and that is precisely why grace is amazing and necessary. Yet in this case, a continuous and unlimited number of groveling apologies by Mr. Imus only whetted the appetites of the merciless reverends. He does owe the women at Rutgers an apology, and he’s going to meet with them face to face to give it. He does not owe Al Sharpton an apology, but he gave him one anyway. Instead of accepting the apology, Sharpton and his friends simply invited more vultures to circle around their victim. Sure enough, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Opra Winfrey, Procter and Gamble, Staples, American Express, Sprint Nextel, General Motors, and finally, MSNBC and CBS pounced on the prey. They have turned Don Imus into this week’s Richard Nixon, and once they finish him off, they’ll go searching for a new victim, because ravenous wolves are always hungry. It’s worth noting that the only two notable men who refused their turn at the canibal’s table were Joe Lieberman and John McCain. Both of them expressed appropriate disapproval for what Don Imus said last week, but they were at least willing to give him a chance to make amends. I disagree with Senators Lieberman and McCain about many things, but I don’t question their personal courage. It should be noted though that their willingness to stand up for what they believe, whether I believe it or not, is ruining both of their political careers.

I asked my co-worker if he really believed Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would have been interested in this case if Mr. Imus were black or if most of the women on the Rutgers basketball team were white. We all know the answer to that question, and I couldn’t even get a bleeding heart liberal to argue with me about it. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sharpton have never expressed any concern about injustices done by blacks, or injustice suffered by whites or other racial groups. Their version of justice isn’t color blind, as it ought to be. In fact, their version of justice is every bit as racist in its intent as the ugly story about bullet Bob Hayes having to drink from a separate water fountain because he was black, even though he had represented the United States in the Olympics. No matter how evil, slavery and discrimination do not justify the trans-generational guilt passing Sharpton and Jackson advocate. No one in their right mind believes I have the right to rape someone’s sister because their great grandfather raped my great grandmother, but this is exactly the sort of world these so-called reverends advocate.

One might suppose, based on the above paragraphs, that I actually like Don Imus. The truth is that I would probably rather have an appendectomy than to have to listen to him for an hour. I have listened to brief segments of his shows from time to time, and this is how I would describe his attitude. “I suck, you suck, everyone sucks, everything sucks, life sucks, and I feel really grumpy about it.” It’s not the sort of message one wants to wake up to in the morning. Imus is unpleasant, bitter, miserable, and even self-loathing. Waking up to a Don Imus broadcast is nearly as unpleasant as waking up with a snarling dog, nearly but not quite.

I know very well that Don Imus is not a choir boy, and I have no illusions that he’s likely to become one. But there is something I like about him. Howard Stern has many of the same disagreeable characteristics as Don Imus, yet I can’t even print how he says he would have reacted to this scandal, if it were of his making. Howard Stern is beyond redemption, he knows he’s a jerk, yet he’s proud and arrogant about it, and he wants his hostile attitude to be shoved into everyone’s face.

By contrast, Don Imus tried to do what a gentleman would do when he realized he had made a big mistake. My impression of Don Imus is that he’s a jerk, but on some level he is ashamed of being a jerk, and he wants a way out. The wrong reverends Jackson and Sharpton should be offering this man an olive branch, but it’s not in their arsenal. They are predators, who will now tighten their grip on the cowardly and search for a victim for their next ambush. It’s pathological for them.

Here’s what I have read about the exchange which started this uproar. On the morning after Rutgers lost to Tennessee, Imus said, “Those are some rough girls from Rutgers. They’ve got tattoos.” In the initial part of the exchange, calling them rough girls may actually have been a compliment, since he was discussing a basketball team. We’ll never know what he meant, because no one has been interested in asking, and the conversation took an unfortunate turn afterwords. His producer said, “They are some hard-core hos.” Only then did Imus echo what his producer had said by saying, “Those are some nappy-headed hos, I can tell you that.” I don’t even know what nappy-headed means, and I don’t think most Americans have ever heard that term. Hos, is a slang expression for whores, and it is the slang of rappers and some blacks, but the word whore says nothing about anyone’s skin color. Of course, it was a rude, offensive and inappropriate remark. But I don’t think I know anyone who hasn’t said something to a parent, a spouse, to their children, or about strangers which they have later regretted. It’s what people do after they make mistakes which really matters.

My real concern is not about Don Imus, but about the selective indignation of those who have favorite groups of people, though they are utterly without compassion for anyone else. Don Imus never has been one of my favorite people, but he tried to be a better man this week than he was last week, and I am more upset about his failure to get anyone to listen this week than about his failure last week.

Finally, I want to say something about the Rutgers basketball team itself, specifically about a quote attributed to Matee Ajavon that being called a “nappy-headed ho” on TV has scarred her for life. It’s reasonable to me that she should be displeased, perhaps even disgusted, by that characterization of herself and her teammates. But scarred for life? She needs to be reminded that the TV has an “off” switch. There are many things in life which don’t come with an “off” switch. Just to give a simple example, my parents divorced when I was nine, and there was no “off” switch so I could ignore the disintegration of my family. I’m not excusing name-calling. It shouldn’t have happened, and everyone who writes knows that words are important. Nevertheless, if she can’t handle being called a name by a grumpy old white man, who calls everybody names, she hasn’t got the courage or the backbone to survive on a planet like this one. When Don Imus meets the Rutgers basketball team, they have every right to share their hurt feelings. But it would be nice if at least one of them would acknowledge that this incident has been more costly to him than to any of them.

FATHER FORGIVE THEM NOT, FOR THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DO

On Wednesday night, the annual national correspondents dinner was held in Washington, D.C. This event is a gathering of the mainstream media and some of the nation’s top politicians, who those correspondents either praise or lambast daily, depending on which side of the aisle they’re on. Because of his plummeting poll numbers and the media’s determination to keep them plummeting, President Bush should have skipped this event, but he attended this dinner, as he always does. He poked fun at himself by noting that former President Clinton wrote a lengthy memoir after his presidency ended, and President Bush said he’s thinking about doing a memoir of his own, perhaps a popup book. That line was supposed to amuse the members of the White House press corps, who keep telling us daily that Bill Clinton was smart and George Bush is an idiot. I believe this president is overly gracious to his domestic sworn enemies, and I think he should find something else to do instead of attending next year’s national correspondence dinner. But his inclination toward self-deprecating humor in the face of his critics doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the dinner’s other notable incident, which was reported on by Thursday’s Los Angeles Times.

NBC news anchor Brian Williams, along with Cheryl Gould, Senior Vice President of NBC news and two comedians participated in a skit aimed at Vice President Cheney’s 2006 hunting accident, which has now become the most overly discussed accident in the history of mankind. At the end of the skit, Mr. Williams reportedly was burping to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” To be fair, Brian Williams was recruited for this skit, which makes him slightly (but only slightly) less guilty than its originator. Also, I have not been able to find a video or audio clip of this skit, and my reaction to it might be a little bit different if I could view it in context, instead of just reading about it.

I would not mind if Brian Williams burped out a rendition of the old “things go better with Coke” commercial. After all, the carbonation in Coke tends to make people burp. But “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” can’t be compared to an advertising jingle. To understand what Brian Williams did, one has to read the lyrics to the song’s six verses, which I am reproducing below, as follows:

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel;
“As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet;
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free;
[originally …let us die to make men free]
While God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave;
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Our God is marching on.”

Burping this hymn is tragic and sacrilegious, but it is not amusing. Obviously, this Civil War hymn is about Jesus. If it were about Mohammed, Brian Williams would by now have been added to the Salman Rushdie death list, and he probably would have gone into hiding somewhere. I’m certainly not advocating anyone’s execution over a comedic skit, but I think Christians ought to loudly insist on an apology. Unfortunately, they won’t. Perhaps they’re not well-informed, or they are sleeping through their Sunday morning sermons, and they will allow this outrageous mocking of their faith to continue publicly without even a whimper of disapproval. Shame on them. I’m going to send my comments to NBC, where they will blissfully ignore them, because I am part of a very small minority who cares.

I have absolutely no animosity toward Brian Williams or anyone else at NBC. But whether they believe it or not, I wish they understood the impact of the four gospels, and the Bible in general, on civilization and on the hearts of millions of individuals. More than that, I believe the Prince of Peace will reappear on earth at a time of his own choosing to raise the living and the dead. On that day, Brian Williams will be a very unfortunate creature if Jesus Christ is steamed at him. Brian Williams and Cheryl Gould would do well to reconsider and issue a public apology for this episode.

THE GRAPES OF CALIFORNIA’S WRATH

I have only been in California three times, and I just returned from my first trip there since 1978. I was in the bay area in 1978, a place where God’s creative genius and the foolishness of man are both displayed in a spectacular fashion.

But this time I was in southern California for four days, visiting expensive tourist traps with my wife and kids. They had fun, and that was the purpose of the vacation, but my impressions of southern California are far from the romanticized surf music of the 1960s.

The first thing we learned about California is that gasoline is about forty cents a gallon more just across the border than it is in Arizona, and it’s best to buy gas on the Arizona side, if possible. I assume the difference is because of state taxes, not anything related to oil companies or supply and demand. I couldn’t help but recall former California governor Gray Davis saying that California is at war with Texas and big oil. Believe me, Texans were never routed at the Alamo the way Californians are routed every day at the gas pump. It seems evident that Texans won the war and Californians lost, but the reality is far more complicated than that. California is the ultimate laboratory for the display of the excesses of capitalism and the madness of socialism. Their war is really with Saudi Arabia (though they would rather blame Texans for it) and with their own desire to tax themselves into oblivion.

California is so expensive for tourists that we were only able to go because we could stay with friends. They live in a very nice $600,000 home, and I dare not speculate about their mortgage payments. Their $600,000 house would be two or three times more expensive if it were conveniently located. As is, it is near a farm at the end of a cow pasture. The stench outside their front door is unbelievable, considering the expense of living there. A house with the same aroma in Hereford, Texas would probably cost 80% less.
Worse than putting up with the cows, our friends have to drive two hours each way on the freeways to their jobs, to their son’s school, or to the church they pastor. We went to Legoland on Monday, Knott’s Berry Farm on Tuesday and Newport Beach on Wednesday, always with approximately the same two hour drive times each way. Unfortunately, my commutes in Phoenix are similar, because of the Dial-a-Ride buses I ride, so none of this shocks me very much. But nearly everyone in southern California is similarly inconvenienced, and I can barely imagine an entire culture being crushed by astronomical expenses and the exponentially greater hardships of California life.

One of the bleakest moments of the trip was when our hosts confessed that they don’t really have any friends. If someone gave me a pulpit and an audience for two hours every Sunday, I think I would eventually be friends with somebody, but perhaps not in California, where the daily struggle to survive saps everyone of the energy they might normally spend on relationships with other people.

On Monday night I sat and watched “24″ with them, a TV show whose plot includes a terrorist nuclear attack on the city of Los Angeles area, and I wondered if I wouldn’t sleep more comfortably in Toledo or Saginaw than I would in Los Angeles. I sat on the beach Wednesday and hoped that the San Andreas fault would hold itself together a little bit longer, and I thought about tidal waves, mud slides, forest fires, and the more immediate concern that someone on a California freeway might send my family and me into eternity prematurely. Most of all, I thought about my grandparents who lived in a small house in Amarillo, and I thought about how much wealthier they were than virtually anyone in southern California, where no amount of money can separate you from the catastrophe California has become and will likely be in the near future.

Of course, the glass is half full. My kids had a wonderful time, which they will probably remember for the rest of their lives, but I hope they gained some insight too. I hope they’ll confine their California days to visits, but they will never dwell with the teeming masses.

I forgot to mention the sunburn, from which I am still recovering. I get around, I’ve felt the warmth of the sun, but there weren’t any good vibrations. So don’t worry baby, I’m leaving.

MARCH MADNESS

At one time yesterday, there were three college basketball games being televised on our local cable channels. Two of them were men’s games, and one was a women’s game.

That’s not at all unusual, but I dared to ask my wife the following question. “Who is the audience for women’s basketball? Men hardly ever watch women’s basketball, and I bet it’s not what women talk about when they go shopping together either. Next week many people in offices will be filling out their brackets for the men’s NCAA tournament, and hardly anybody will be filling out brackets for the women’s tournament. In fact, I’ve never seen it done. Unless Pat Summit promises to sing “Rocky Top” again, women’s basketball will get a lot of TV time during the next month, even though the audience for it is miniscule.”

My wife’s response was, “There are many greater issues in life than which basketball games are on TV.” That sure is a revelation to me. I was not aware that anything was more important in March than basketball, men’s basketball. I don’t mind at all that women have the opportunity to play basketball, and I’ll even acknowledge that Pat Summit might be a better coach than Bob Knight, though I’m not sure how anyone would compare their achievements. But the fact that women’s basketball is being thrown at us, though it has no natural audience, has implications far beyond sports. Women’s basketball is being shoved into our faces because somebody thinks it’s good for us. It’s the tyrany of the same elitist minority which wants to take God out of the pledge of allegiance and the loud tedious bunch which wants us to stop eating chicken because it’s cruel to the chickens and it disrupts their family structures. The sad part of it is they’re serious, and we’re going to lose a lot of our freedom unless we emphatically tell these people to sit down and shut up.

Well, that’s all the hate speech I can muster up this morning, but I’m sure I’ll come up with more later. I’m just full of it.

WORRYING ABOUT THE WRONG THINGS

It is worth giving some thought from time to time to what we are being sensitized to, and what we are being desensitized about. A couple of weeks ago, the National Basketball Association had its annual all-star game in Las Vegas. It wasn’t so long ago that professional sports leagues avoided Las Vegas as if it were Neptune, because of the city’s connection to gambling, organized crime, prostitution, etc. But it’s probably just a matter of time now before the NBA, the NFL, the NHL or major league baseball locate a franchise in Las Vegas. People have been going to Las Vegas to gamble since before I was born, but casinos are everywhere now, and every other American city seems to envy the once-in-a-lifetime decadence which used to be unique to Las Vegas. By the way, I’ve been to Las Vegas, too. But I went to a funeral and skipped the city’s other attractions.

Before the NBA all-star game, a former player named Tim Hardaway said he hated gays, would have felt uncomfortable with gays on his team, and didn’t want to share a locker room with them. Some of what Tim Hardaway said was inappropriate. I don’t think it’s right to hate homosexuals, and I wouldn’t have said that. On the other hand, there was a bit of common sense to part of what he said. I recall once being required to have a physical when I was seventeen. It wasn’t a complete physical; rather, it was the “drop your drawers, turn your head and cough” physical which every man is familiar with. In the room with me was a male doctor and a female nurse. I accepted the nurse’s presence as a medical professional, but I remember being disgusted when the nurse left just as soon as the doctor said I could pull up my pants. She didn’t seem to have any other purpose for being there, except to watch me undress. I know most women have had similar experiences, and I’ve heard a lot of stories about their feelings about them. I would have been even more uncomfortable if the doctor had told me he was gay.

That sort of common sense has vanished from the NBA. The NBA uninvited Tim Hardaway from its all-star events, and it said his statements didn’t reflect the league’s position. The obvious question for me is why a basketball league needs a position about homosexuality. Since the NBA seems to need a position about gay rights, I wonder if I should refer to it as the NB Gay.

All of that was old news until yesterday, when the Sacramento Kings felt obliged to suspend Ron Artest indefinitely for assaulting his girlfriend and preventing her from calling 911. Ron Artest has been a problem child since he joined the league, and this is not his first physical assault. There have been five 911 calls from his residence, just since August. There have always been second chances for Artest until now, but I suspect Tim Hardaway won’t have any second chances, even though he apologized. Is so-called hate speech a greater offense than charging spectators or slamming one’s girlfriend to the floor? In 1963, Medgar Evers was shot in the back. The “n” word, no matter how despicable it is, never killed him. What people say is important, but we are far too concerned about what people say, and not nearly concerned enough about what they do. The NBA is straining out gnats and swallowing camels.

On another subject, a rookie policeman was killed recently in Glendale, AZ. He survived two tours of duty in Iraq, only to return to the states and be gunned down by a career criminal. For all of the justifiable grief about American casualties in Iraq, it’s worth wondering what sort of America our soldiers will be returning to.

A man in Michigan recently killed and dismembered his wife, got on TV, pretending to be innocent, and cried tears of insincerity on camera about his wife’s disappearance.

Yesterday, in an act of personal terrorism, an Indiana man deliberatley crashed a small airplane into his mother-in-law’s house, killing himself and his eight-year-old daughter, who was on the airplane with him, after calling his ex-wife, the girl’s mother, to tell her she would never see her daughter again. I can almost hear him saying to his daughter earlier, “Honey, wouldn’t it be fun to ride in an airplane today?” I wonder how long she knew her father intended to kill her.

Then there’s the 21-year-old man in Connecticut who repeatedly stabbed his seventeen-year-old wife, and then gave the bloody knife to their two-year-old and said, “Now you stab mommy.”

I could go on to mention the video of adults in Texas teaching a two-year-old and a five-year-old to smoke marijuana. I wonder if the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORMAL) think that’s normal. Do they expect us to believe it wouldn’t happen if marijuana was legal?

Maybe I should just take the media’s word for it, that George W. Bush is America’s Hitler. He stole two elections, he must be stopped, and the only thing else which matters is who’s going to wind up with Anna Nicole Smith’s money and who fathered her baby. But I don’t really want to hear about George Bush or Anna Nicole Smith anymore. I want to hear journalists get on the air, read the above news stories, and cry the sort of tears I heard Israelis cry after the 1972 olympics. Then the news will be worth watching again.

I realize these are news stories, not commonplace events. But I can’t help feeling that America needs a Jonah more than Nineveh ever did. I would volunteer to be the new Jonah, but I haven’t been called, and apparently no one else has been either. Perhaps God doesn’t warn us, because he knows we wouldn’t listen.

WHAT IF

What if a generation arises, and they are characterized by the following:

O God is rarely mentioned among them, except when someone is using profanity. Speaking of God in any public place is always discouraged, and it is considered highly offensive, except when the god is Allah, the god of terrorism.

O Most people do not choose to have children. When a woman becomes pregnant, unless the pregnancy occurs at the perfect time, under the perfect circumstances, the child is a member of the desired gender, and a battery of tests shows that the child is perfectly normal, the pregnancy will be terminated quietly. If a child is born with any sort of defect, which was not discovered during pregnancy, the child will be disposed of by a medical professional, but its tissue will be used for medical research. No child under two years of age has any legal rights. Because of the growing trend toward gender selection, there is an increasing shortage of baby boys, since males generally are considered socially less desirable.

O Marriage is unusual. When people do marry, it is regarded as a dying practice of some religious sects or polygamists, and those who do marry are asked why they’re taking such an unusual step. Marriage no longer has any legal status, whatsoever. For financial reasons, people may register domestic parterships with the state, and those partnerships may consist of any combination of two or more people, regardless of gender, age or previous genetic relationships.

O It is almost impossible to define who a child’s legal parents are, because in addition to a birth mother and father, several others may claim parental rights because of the complex and changing partnerships of those raising children. Children are encouraged not to rely on parental bonds, and there is no societal preference for how many mothers and fathers a child has, because, as Hillary Clinton put it, “It takes a village.” Many women who want children are impregnated artificially, making fathers unknown and unnecessary.

O Diversity is to be desired above all things. No nation has borders or a common language. Those who would like enforcible borders and a common national language, or who dislike the outsourcing of jobs, are considered racists, and they are sent to re-education classes where they are instructed about the beauty of every language, culture and creed, except their own. All non-European and non-Western culture is to be praised constantly. However, it is permissible, even preferred, to acknowledge the mistakes of some cultures, particularly cultures which were traditionally Christian or Jewish.

O The purpose of sex is primarily recreational. It is considered normal to have a wide array of sexual partners, concurrently and spontaneously. But because of the continuing problem of sexually transmitted diseases, everyone who is at least eight years old is required to be vaccinated annually against all transmittable sexual diseases. By law, condoms and other birth control devices will be distributed in all public and private schools, even in preschools for educational purposes. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that just as a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion, all adults have a constitutional right to sexual services, including prostitution. The court has also struck down all zoning ordinances with regard to adult businesses, and the FCC no longer enforces broadcast decency standards of any kind.

O On the other hand, food consumption is tightly regulated. All restaurants are required to serve only heart healthy products. Fast food chains, such as Dunkin Donuts, are illegal. The consumption of meat and poultry is highly discouraged. Fruits and vegetables are preferred.

O All laws regarding formerly controlled substances have been repealed. Marijuana and opium replace corn and wheat as the primary cash crops everywhere. This is supposed to reduce crime and to allow governments to allocate their resources more appropriately, but crime continues to soar, and new strains of potentially fatal drugs appear on the street almost daily. Drug cartels expand, instead of disappearing, and their turf wars become so violent that drug lords have many of the best armies on earth. Meth labs are on virtually every street.

O There are no longer any rules against steroids or other performance-enhancing substances in sports, because they have become unenforcible. Indeed, it has become virtually impossible to compete in professional, college or high school sports without using performance-enhancing substances. Attendance at sporting events soars, but the average life expectancy of most athletes drops to about forty years. Contracts with drug companies replace shoe contracts as the primary source of income for most coaches.

O “No child left behind” now refers to the law which requires all children to attend public or private schools. No diploma can be granted without passing a standardized test, which requires students to correctly answer questions stating that they feel no bigotry toward homosexuals, trans-gendered people, or any lifestyle preference other than their own. By law, all public bathrooms are available to everyone, based on their self-perceived sexual identity, regardless of whether they appear to be male or female to anyone else.

O Identity theft and computer crime is now so widespread that laws against it are nearly unenforcible. Many people no longer consider it to be dishonest to steal from someone whose face they are unlikely to ever see. In an effort to protect the public, online banking services and most web sites where things used to be bought or sold have been shut down. Most business is once again conducted in the traditional way, with a pen and paper.

O After an election, no candidate ever makes a concession speech. All candidates claim victory and announce that their legal team is looking into the reasons why their votes were not counted.

O No new sources of energy have been found to be economical, and it is impossible to build new power plants of any kind, or to upgrade existing ones, due to environmental concerns. However, technological advances have permitted the development of hybrid cars, which create so little noise that they frequently kill blind pedestrians. Auto makers have responded by saying that their customers want quieter cars and by filing wrongful life lawsuits against parents who allowed blind children to live.

O Displaying the flag of the United States or any nation in the European Union is no longer permitted, because it is offensive and insensitive to certain minority groups.

O It has become standard practice for the media not to disclose the name, race, gender or creed of anyone who commits a crime, because doing so might reinforce negative stereotypes. Exceptions are made, however, if the criminal is a rabbi or a clergyman in a Christian denomination. The public has a right to know.

O The tax-exempt status of all religious organizations has been revoked. Non-sectarian organizations, such as the A.C.L.U. continue to be tax-exempt.

O Christmas is no longer a federal holiday, because it is unconstitutional to recognize a holiday whose origins are religious. Instead, the government has replaced Christmas with Halloween. Therefore, most businesses are open on December 25, but closed on October 31, in order to observe the new national holiday.

O Worst of all, imagine that all of this has gone on for a generation, and no one remembers a time when any of it was unusual. Not so long ago, all of this would have been bad fiction, but now all of this is possible. Is this the world you want to live in?

RESTORATION

Neil Sedaka twice recorded a song called “Breaking up is Hard to Do”. Breaking up may be difficult, but it isn’t nearly as difficult as restoring a shattered reputation. I’ve been thinking about this this week, ever since I heard about the dreadful story of astronaut (presumably former astronaut) Lisa Nowak, who drove 900 miles in a diaper from Houston to Orlando, in order to intimidate, threaten, or perhaps kill perceived rival Colleen Shipman in a “love triangle” gone bad.

Lisa Nowak could not have gotten into the astronaut corps without doing some things very well. I didn’t pay very much attention to the space shuttle mission she was on last July, because the space missions these days which go well seem fairly routine, and we all hear more than we want to hear about the disasters. But it would be easier to win a lottery than to become an astronaut. After all, there are new lottery winners every few days. I don’t expect astronauts to be choir boys or choir girls, but I do expect them to stay out of this sort of trouble. In spite of any charges which may be filed against her, she must be a remarkable person in many of the ways we humans measure excellence. Perhaps the Bible is right when it says that the human heart is desperately wicked, above all things.

Wasn’t Lisa Nowak living the American dream? Didn’t she have it all? She had her career, a husband, and three children, including five-year-old twin daughters. Perhaps her 19-year marriage was coming apart. Perhaps she didn’t have it all. But whatever she had, she may well be trading it for jail time. It’s hard not to feel sad about her, even if she deserves the fate which awaits her. Going forward, it’s going to be very difficult for her to have a life worth living.

If she pays whatever debt society exacts from her, can she someday resume her career at NASA? More importantly, can her intended victim, the man she was pursuing, her husband, her children, and her fellow astronauts forgive her for what she has done, or should they? Do we live in a society which is so transient that NASA should train someone else to take her place and her husband can replace her with another woman, and will her children regard the new woman as their “real mother”, even though she gave birth to them? If things are that unstable, does that contribute to how crazy and insecure people are, and why they always seem to be grasping for a better reality? What should she do to merit the forgiveness of everyone involved? Of course, I don’t know whether or not she is even the slightest bit penitent about what she has done. But even if she is, it’s going to be a long hard road to recovery for her, and human beings are generally not very merciful.

This week I also read an article about former New Life church pastor Ted Haggard, the man who hired a homosexual prostitute and may also have bought drugs from him. The article indicated that other pastors have been counseling him and that he “has discovered he is completely heterosexual”. That discovery isn’t particularly remarkable, since it applies to most of us, and it presumably applies to the vast majority of those he pastored. What caught my attention about the article, though, was their recommendation that he should leave Colorado, and he should obtain a secular position outside of the ministry. It was as if the other pastors said, “You’re cured, but get lost.” For what it’s worth, I would have given him very different advice. I would have told him that leaving is a copout, he needs to face the people he has embarrassed, and they need to face the reality of whether or not they are willing to forgive him. I wouldn’t put him back in the pulpit any time soon, but I would insist on him being willing to serve his congregation in a lesser capacity. As in the former case, there is a real issue regarding whether or not he is truly penitent about the terrible and hypocritical things he did. If he is, it does neither him nor his congregation any good to run away from each other.

WHAT BECKY TAUGHT ME

It was Friday, April 13, 1973 when her letter came. I had been friends with Becky for about three and a half years at that time, and I still have fond memories of her, in spite of the letter she sent me. We were friends, not lovers, yet it sounded like the proverbial “Dear John” letter to me. Beyond the actual contents of the letter, there was an unmistakable tone which informed me that I had gone from being one of her close friends to being a very low priority.

I was a sophomore in college at the time, and Becky had dropped out of school at a different university and gone to work. The letter said she had met a man at work and they had gotten married on March 23, three weeks before I got the letter.

It is normal to congratulate a close friend when they get married. But I had assumed that if she decided to get married, I would be invited to the wedding, and I expected to meet the groom prior to the wedding. Unfortunately, I had never heard of him, and the marriage was a complete surprise.

Early the following summer I got in touch with Becky and asked her how all of this had come about. She said she had gone out with her husband once, brought him back to her apartment, and basically, he never left. In other words, the marriage was basically the culmination of a one-night stand, which today would be called “hooking up”. “Shacking up” was the less flattering phrase in 1973. This explanation of her marriage deepened my disappointment.

But in an effort to be a good sport, I asked if I could meet her husband, and I saw them together occasionally for the next couple of years. I didn’t like her husband, I didn’t like the way she chose him, and I didn’t like the way I found out about him.

Yet I’m not writing this to complain. In fact, Becky did me a great favor. When she wrote the letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and stuck it in the mailbox, she could not have guessed how her letter would change my life.

Figuratively speaking, Becky was not the real author of the letter. At the university, I had become bored with Darwin, Freud and Marx, and I was quietly searching for another source of wisdom. At the urging of a friend, I began reading the Bible in January 1973. I had many questions about its salvation by faith message, particularly because Becky was one of my closest friends, and she claimed to be an atheist.

Since God is invisible to all of us, is it fair for him to regard people who believe in him with greater favor than those who don’t? Are people of faith really better people, morally speaking? Would they treat me better? I was wrestling with these questions when Becky’s letter came. To be fair, I have had problems with some Christians since 1973 which were worse than the problem I had then with Becky. Yet I suspected that if I had been friends with a devout Christian, instead of Becky, she would have chosen her husband more carefully, I would have liked him, and I would have been invited to the wedding.

I have since come to the conclusion that even though the contents of her letter were terribly disappointing to me at the time, the invisible hand of God was the letter’s real author. God answered my questions, because they were honest questions, not just obstacles or roadblocks which I could have used as rationalizations or excuses. God is not afraid of anyone’s questions, and we all have some.

I became a Christian during the summer of 1973. Without a bit of malice or sarcasm, I want to close by saying, “Thank you Becky.”

THE RANDOM CONSEQUENCES GAME

Perhaps it was a foolish personal decision, but now I’m going to have to stick with it. I awoke this morning at 4 a.m., probably because my younger son had crawled into bed with his parents and was sleeping almost on top of me. I spent much of the night pushing his feet off of me, and I finally gave up and got up.

When I arrived in the living room, I discovered that my older son was sleeping on the couch, and the TV was on. It had probably been entertaining nobody for several hours.

I remembered that my son had asked if he could sleep on the couch last night. I gave him permission to do so, on one condition. The TV was not to be turned on. He assured me he would not watch TV, but he turned it on once the rest of us went to sleep. We haven’t had an incident like this for several months, perhaps a year or more, but this is not the first time we have found him crashed on the couch or the living room floor with the TV on when we woke up in the morning. This has probably happened ten times.

Even though I find almost everything on television disgusting, and I would like to get rid of the TV entirely, my wife hangs onto it, partly because she watches it at night, and partly because there are times when she needs to give the kids something to do when she is busy working from home. Children’s television is particularly pointless.

When my wife woke up, I told her about our discipline problem, and we agreed we should give it some thought and come up with an appropriate punishment.

Before we discussed it again, my son woke up and we both informed him he was residing in the dog house with us, because he had assured both of us he would not watch TV if we let him sleep in the living room, and we went away to discuss how to punish him.

Unfortunately, we failed to arrive at a consensus about what to do. We gave him a game cube for Christmas, and my son (who is ten) had suggested we take it away from him for a week. That wouldn’t be very much punishment, because he only has one game, and he is bored with it anyway. My wife and I talked about the possibility of postponing any future game purchases for a period of time, but I didn’t like that idea, because we have always punished this offense in the past with less TV time and less computer time, but his disobedience continues.

She wanted to have him do extra chores around the house for a week every day when he got home from school. It’s not a terrible idea, except that if he doesn’t do the chores or doesn’t do them to her satisfaction, we would have to come up with another layer of discipline to punish him for his unwillingness to properly clean and beautify the premises.

My biggest problem with her approach, though, is that I believe he would forget the price he paid for his night of unauthorized TV as soon as the week was over. Because this has been an ongoing problem, I wanted to give him a punishment which he might still remember five or ten years from now. I wanted to refuse to allow him to go to an overnight sleepover which our church is sponsoring next month. I wanted to do this, specifically because my son is very social, and he especially loves activities, such as birthday parties, with other kids. He wants to live in a kids world where he can be a hero to other kids, which he can’t do if he has to stay home.

My wife objected to my plan, because she regards church activities as sacred character builders. I share her faith in God. But his character is our responsibility, not the responsibility of the church, and I think denying him something he really wants to do would probably produce more character in him than a night at a church. This is particularly true, considering that at last year’s event, the kids stayed up until 1 a.m. watching videos together. What the church did last year was to feed the very addiction to screen time which is getting him in trouble at home. My assumption is that this year’s event will be similar. He came home from last year’s sleepover with the same character we sent him there with, and I don’t think that will change this year either. I have a simple two-word suggestion for parents and churches who are really concerned about the character of today’s children. “Unplug it!”

But when it became apparent that my wife has more faith in the character-building potential of organized religion than I do, and we would not be able to reach a consensus, I made the following proposal to my son, and my wife reluctantly agreed. I told my son that all three of us have different opinions about what the consequences for this should be. I said, “Even your opinion is worth considering, because you didn’t kill anyone, you didn’t beat anyone up, you didn’t steal from anyone, etc.” So I propose we use the computer to select one of our three punishments at random. Of course, I didn’t have to consider his idea for punishment, which I thought was inadequate, but I decided to do so, since I thought my wife’s proposed punishment was also inadequate.

So this is how I arrived at random consequences for his night of excessive TV. I went to the command prompt on this computer and typed the word TIME and pressed enter. The result appeared in hours, minutes, seconds and hundredths of a second. If the hundredths of a second had been 00, I would have typed TIME over again. I was going to consider any result from 01 to 99. I would divide the result by 3. If that result had a remainder of 1, such as 40, my punishment would prevail, because I’m the oldest, and he could say goodbye to his church outing. If the remainder was 2, such as 80, my wife would win, and he could look forward to a week of extra chores. If the remainder was 0, he would lose his game cube for a week.

Now that I’ve explained the random consequences game, the result was 84, evenly divisible by 3, with a remainder of 0, which means my son has lost his game cube for a week. Believe it or not, my wife is quite happy with this result, because no sacred activities have been lost. My son was thrilled by the computer’s mercy. I’m not happy about the computer’s decision, and I feel I’ve been manipulated by its central processing unit. But on the other hand, my wife and I are not fighting about it. For sixteen years, I have saved my marriage by not winning and not winning and not winning and not winning and …

In a more patriarchal generation or culture, I might have just made the decision, and I might have a wife who would happily let me make the decision or at least she might have lived silently with her distress, but I live in 2007. Ozzie and Harriet are dead, 1957 is over, and perhaps I should buy myself a dress and shave my legs.

FULLY MINDLESS

Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly be more disgusted with most of what’s on the radio, particularly on the f.m. (fully mindless) band, a Sacramento station has brought us to a new low in potty-mouth entertainment. Typical of how shock jocks think, the filthy frequency fillers at KDND f.m. thought it would be fun to see how long some of their listeners could drink water without going to the bathroom. The objective of the “hold your wee for a Wii” contest was supposed to be to give one of their listeners a Nintendo game system if they could drink the most water without going to the bathroom. Unfortunately, one of their listeners, a 28-year-old mother of three named Jennifer Strange (I’m not making this up), died after drinking too much water and not winning the Wii for the three motherless children she leaves behind. Apparently, the DND part of their KDND call letters stands for “do not die while participating in one of our foolish contests.”

Of course, I understand that no one at the radio station intended to kill Jennifer Strange, and water intoxication deaths are relatively rare, though not unheard of. Nevertheless, note the “it couldn’t be our fault” response of the marketing manager at the station.

“We are awaiting information that will help explain how this tragic event occurred.”

Wait no more, let me explain it to you. I don’t live in Sacramento, nor have I ever heard your station, but based on what I hear locally, I have a pretty good idea how this happened. Your station has hired people for their drive time entertainment who are unusually fascinated by everything human genitals do, sexually and otherwise, and they spend much of their mornings discussing their hobby with the community. They dreamed up this contest, hoping they could spend a morning joking about a few of their listeners crossing their legs, hoping the pain of winning a Wii would subside. It was just supposed to be a ratings bonanza, not a murder, but that won’t help her three children very much.

Now you’re awaiting word about what went wrong. What went wrong went wrong in your minds and in your hearts, and it’s really wrong that you don’t understand what went wrong. Here are some other things I hope will go wrong for you. I hipe you will be sued, I hope your company will be bankrupted by your potty scandal, and I hope your station’s license will be pulled. I know you have families too, but perhaps you can find a way to support them in a more honest and dignified way. Perhaps now you will come to see how foolish and inappropriate your fascination with the four-letter words you know and everyone’s genitals is, and perhaps now you can grow up, like the rest of us have had to do.

ps. Since I originally posted this, I have learned some additional things. Jennifer Strange was one of 18 contestants in this contest. She finished second, winning tickets to a Justin Timberlake concert, which she will be unable to attend due to her death. She consumed approximately two gallons of water, or 32 cups of water. Of course, she should have stopped, but there were prizes to win.

More importantly, a listener called the station and warned them the contest could be fatal. Their responses were “Yeah, we’re aware of that.” and “Yeah, they signed releases, so we’re not responsible.” “We’re OK.” They acknowledged on the air that they knew of a college student who died from drinking too much water in 2005, and they interviewed Jennifer Strange on the air after she began complaining that her head hurt, and even made jokes about the possibility that she might pass out or puke on the air. The negligence of the morning DJs, the station management, and the station’s parent company, Entercom/Sacramento, are unbelievable, and almost heartless beyond comprehension. The morning show staff has been fired, but that’s only the beginning of what should happen. The entire broadcast industry around the country needs to be cleaned up. It’s full of people like this.

MY UNUSUAL NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION

Like many others, I was momentarily elated when “Time” magazine named me person of the year earlier this month. Oh, I know you thought you won the award, but when I read “you”, it meant me. Actually, the award was given to anyone who produces web content, no matter how desirable or undesirable it is. I’m still waiting for “Time” to send me my prize (after all, the Nobel committee gives a prize to its winners), but the check hasn’t arrived. They owe me something for helping them sell magazines.

My thrill about having won the award wore off earlier this week, and here’s how it happened. My wife needed to work the day after Christmas at an unusual time, so I took the day off to babysit my kids. My older son wanted to play games on this computer, and I let him do it. My younger son wanted to watch “Cars” on the new portable DVD player grandma got him for Christmas, so I let him do that. I was tempted to go into another room and put on some music, because I wasn’t particularly interested in what they were doing. But then it occurred to me. “Doesn’t that really defeat the purpose of spending the day at home with my kids, if all three of us plug into our own entertainment sources?” Some day they’ll be grown and they’ll leave home, and I won’t have opportunities like this to simply be with them. So I decided to watch “Cars” with my younger son. The problem was that I had never seen it, and he had already seen it about twenty times. So the next thing I knew, he had wandered off by himself to play a game with another toy, and I found myself sitting there watching “Cars” by myself. Imagine how I felt about being “Time”’s person of the year in that context.

Poets used to speculate about how the world will end. Some said it will end with a huge explosion, and others said the world, as we know it, will end with a massive new ice age. But they were all wrong. The world will end when everything becomes so virtual that there’s nothing left of reality. The world will end when we’re all plugged in to things we can’t taste, touch or smell, but we’re disconnected with everyone and everything which physically surrounds us. Our children are already used to being so overly stimulated by the constant din of their entertainment sources that they’re bored when they have to spend a few minutes without them, even if they’re with their parents or with other children. Among other things, the internet has given us a pornographic explosion in which virtual sex with an airbrushed picture of a woman a man can’t touch is supposed to be better than real sex with a real woman, because real women have real imperfections, both physical and otherwise. Who needs a life when life can be brought to you on a flat screen?

All of this made me think of the oddly prophetic Simon and Garfunkel song “Dangling Conversations” song from 1966 when Paul Simon sang,

“You read your Emily Dickinson,
and I, my Robert Frost,
and we note our place with bookmarkers
that measure what we’ve lost.”

In other words, it has somehow become easier to spend time with dead poets than with each other. Later the song says:

“I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You’re a stranger now unto me,
Lost in the dangling conversations
and the superficial sighs
of the borders of our lives.”

Even when we try to talk to each other, we’re still disconnected. That forty-year-old song is far more relevant today than it was when Paul Simon wrote it.

Because I blog and I produce web content, I now understand I’m not the person of the year, I’m the screw-up of the year. So when the check arrives from “Time”, I’m sadly going to have to return it. It’s a matter of integrity, I can’t keep something I don’t deserve.

So I have made a new year’s resolution not to keep stumbling toward a virtual disconnected world. My resolution for 2007 is to try to find a way to still be relevant to my wife and kids, and everyone else around me, by spending more time unplugged, but connected with them. But what am I going to do if they won’t co-operate with me? What will I do if I’m the only one who’s unplugged? It’s going to be a long, hard struggle.

A CHRISTMAS CUP OF TEA

I got up this morning and went into the kitchen to get a cup of tea. This is Christmas eve, and instead of sugar plum fairies, what danced into my head was a little Christmas fantasy, which I will now share with whoever reads this.

I’m not a coffee drinker, and it wouldn’t bother me if coffee beans simply weren’t grown anymore. But I will sometimes sit down with my wife in the morning and have a cup of coffee with her, just to be social, or perhaps because of all of the mornings I remember laying in bed listening to my paternal grandparents drinking coffee together and chatting about everything and nothing in particular.

Both of them have been dead now for more than 35 years, but I sometimes wish I could have just one more morning like that, except that I’m grown now and they wouldn’t be able to insist that I stay in bed. Since I don’t like coffee very much, I wish they could have their coffee this morning, and I could have my cup of tea with them.

I would invite my mother to join us. It’s only fair, she changed my diapers and helped me learn to read. I would ask her not to smoke, and she wouldn’t because this is my fantasy.

I would ask my friend Steve to join us, my first friend in first grade who raised rabbits and told me every day I was a lucky duck. I would be lucky indeed to see him today, since I haven’t seen him since 1961. I wonder what he has done with his life, and this morning, in my dreams I get to find out. He gets to find out that I named one of my sons after him. I hope he would be pleased.

I would invite two other friends from grade school to join us. First, Terry A, who probably wears glasses and carries books under his arm to this day, a boy who went to see the movie “2001″ ten times years later when we were both in high school. I would ask him if he’s still fascinated by computers, or if he’s a scientist.

Then there’s Terry M, the first girl I ever had a crush on. I’m over it now and I might not bring it up, but I sure would be interested to know what she has done with her life.

I would also invite Mrs. Harper, the second grade teacher who told us Santa Claus isn’t real, and we were just a little too spoiled by our parents. She was actually a pretty jolly person, and if I didn’t want to hear what she had to say, I could ask her to play the piano. Any good classical work would keep her busy for a long time.

I would invite my friend Becky from high school. I’m not sure how much I’d let her talk either, because I disagreed with her about everything. Even so, she would sit somewhere near the head of the table, so I could tell her how much I enjoyed being friends with her, how I admired her courage and her outspokenness.

I would invite my friend Lois from college. When the saints go marching in, Lois will be marching near the front. We’ll see her back, and she’ll see the face of God. I would encourage her to talk because she’s always right, she would dispense wisdom and sincerity to my other guests, and she would be as good a friend as any of them could hope for. I want her to bring her husband and each of her five kids, even though they’re too old now to have pillow fights with. Pillow fights wouldn’t be appropriate at a tea party, except perhaps at a Boston tea party, and I don’t want to have one of those.

I would invite Deane and Connie. Deane was one of the pastors of the house church I attended after I became a Christian. Deane had a certain style when he gave a sermon, “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you’ve told them.” Unfortunately, this caused his sermons to be quite lengthy, but I miss them anyway.

I would invite several other people from that church, especially my friends Bob and Kevin. Bob used to make me laugh so hard I thought I might have to start wearing Depends at age 20. After a cup or two of tea with him, bladder control would become a real issue.

Actually, I would issue a blanket invitation to the pastors and their families of every church I’ve attended during the last 35 years, except perhaps for the guy who was having affairs with four women he was counseling. We’re all human, but I don’t want to talk about anyone’s indiscretions over a cup of tea.

I would invite my friend Jennifer, who I used to work with and still know. We’ve had good times and bad times, but even at a table with extraordinary guests, she would be one of the first people anyone would notice, because she cares about everyone around her.

I would invite my friend Joe, the best man at my wedding, and my friend for nearly two decades until lung cancer took his life. Joe made me laugh so hard once that I fainted and fell out of a booth at a restaurant. Instead of saying, “Take it easy.”, he would say “Don’t let your meat loaf.” Pearls of wisdom like that kept me from goofing off when I really wanted too. Joe would be pleased to know I named my other son after him.

I also have to invite my wife and kids. This is the only realistic part, because I actually can have a cup of tea with them this morning. The important thing about my wife, besides her sense of humor and the fact she’s a Christian, is that we get along better now than we did early in our marriage, even when the circumstances we are living through are less favorable. The important thing about my boys is that they will grow up and leave someday and I love them, so I had better enjoy them now.

PEACE ON EARTH AND THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS

Tonight I attended my fifth grade son’s Christmas play, which was held at the charter school he attends. I refer to it as a Christmas play because the children dressed up as trees, snowmen, elves, sugar plum fairies, candy canes and father time, whose name used to be father Christmas. You may remember him as Santa Claus from Christmases long ago. Some of the children sang beautifully, most of them were on key, and the rest deserve an “E” for their effort and enthusiasm. It’s never very hard for parents to be proud of their children at this sort of event. But I was not very happy with my own generation tonight.

I couldn’t help but think back to a long ago Christmas when I was ten years old, and my own fifth grade class had a Christmas concert. The difference between tonight’s event and the Christmas concert in 1963 is so striking that I feel as if I am on a different planet. Of course, I have read and heard much in recent years about the war on Christmas, but seeing it in action is far more compelling than any academic discussion of it.

I didn’t expect a nativity scene in my son’s play. But I never realized until tonight that the schoolboards of America haven’t just made Jesus carry his cross out of the building, they made him carry Mary, Joseph, the wise men, the shepherds and even formerly jolly old St. Nicholas out with him. Father time in my son’s Christmas play only served as a narrator. He never gave gifts to anyone, and my son’s school doesn’t allow gift exchanges, for fear of offending the nameless, faceless minority of zero persons who haven’t yet complained, but might want to. I don’t think Dasher and Dancer should count on invitations to next year’s holiday festivities. It’s just a matter of time before someone realizes that with Santa out of the picture, the reindeer are really quite irrelevant, and Rudolph’s bright red nose serves no purpose.

If this were my first night on earth, I would have come away with absolutely no idea why so few people work on December 25th. The word Christmas was never spoken. Of course, this is the work of a handful of people who have very quietly and successfully stripped Christmas as naked as the ninth of August, which serves no purpose but to fill the gap between the eighth and the tenth of August.

To be sure, my 1963 Christmas concert was hardly a religious event. There were no altar calls, no baptisms, and no one spoke in tongues. We sang both the explicitly Christian songs like “Silent Night”, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, “Angels We Have Heard on High”, etc., mixed in with an equal number of secular favorites such as “Jingle Bells”, “Silver Bells”, “Winter Wonderland” and a few songs about a generous man in a red suit. No one could have walked away without some knowledge of the story of Jesus, but it was hardly a high pressure sales pitch. Everyone did privately as much or as little with it as they wished. That same concert today would be considered intolerant, offensive, and even worse, unconstitutional and illegal.

The irony of all of this is that my son’s charter school was started, and is still run by officials from the church nextdoor who say their charter school is an inexpensive alternative to public schools. Maybe if a few of us were willing to go to jail, we could all have Christmas back. But I don’t even know a pastor who is willing to try, and I wonder if my generation and I myself will someday be asked why we locked Jesus inside the church and wouldn’t let him out. I’m not advocating disrespect for the law, but it’s worth mentioning that Christianity was originally spread by men with faith and the sort of courage which often led them to prison and to death. What I witnessed tonight was not an alternative to the public schools, but an alternative to faith and courage. Based on discussions of other issues I’ve had with them in the past, I feel sure school officials would tell me this was the best they could do. When I went to public school, I remember one teacher in particular who taught reading, writing, arithmetic and the seven deadly sins, without ever quoting a verse of scripture. She taught seven-year-olds, and no one objected.

All of this brings me to my final point. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but perhaps not. In 1963, before the war on Christmas was plainly evident, there was peace on earth, relatively speaking. Vietnam was in the near future, and the Cuban missile crisis was in the recent past. Christians and non-Christians in the United States made peace with Christmas (no matter what they privately believed about it), and we were at peace with each other and with the rest of the world, though the potential for conflict existed. It was not a perfect world, but it was a better world.

But now it’s 2006. There’s war on Christmas and no peace on earth. We can’t figure out how to get out of Iraq without making the world even more dangerous, and we can’t figure out how to get along with each other. Many people want to make the war on Christmas about saying “merry Christmas” instead of “happy holidays”. But that’s just the superficial part of what we’ve lost. I realize that American society used to function relatively well without everyone being pious Christians. But Jesus was in the foreground of some people’s lives, and he was in the cultural background, as an influence on the rest of society. Now that he’s well-hidden in church buildings, everything he opposes is out in the open. We may not realize it, but the loss of Christmas isn’t just the loss of “merry Christmas”. It’s the loss of lives at Columbine High School, it’s the loss of soldiers on the battlefield, it’s drug abuse, it’s pornography, shattered families, fraud, anger, greed and deception. Earlier today I heard a news story about a 14-year-old girl who dropped her baby out of a fifth floor apartment building in New York. 14-year-olds didn’t have babies in 1963, and no one drowned their children. That’s the real price of the war on Christmas. As I sat through my son’s Christmasless Christmas play tonight, Ronald Reagan’s “Are we better off?” question kept echoing in my head. Though the peace on earth chorus grows louder and louder, peace for individuals and for nations is impossible without the Prince of Peace. Merry CHRISTmas!

BETWEEN IRAQ AND A VERY HARD PLACE

Whether or not we should have invaded Iraq, there are only two things any nation which wages war can really do which can be constructive, win the war or lose it. One of the darkest periods in human history was the three years of trench warfare in World War I, a period which cost many men their lives, but accomplished very little militarily.

There are really only two logical things the United States can decide to do in Iraq, win the war or withdraw. We began to lose the war in Iraq, and ironically, any chance we had to capture the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, then we started worrying about our casualty numbers and stopped shocking and aweing those who opposed us. The only reason we were successful in Japan and Germany after the second world war is that we gave them no choice but to cooperate with us.

For three years the Bush administration has been trying to find a third alternative in Iraq. “We will stand down when the Iraqis stand up.” Guess what, the Iraqis show no signs of standing up, and all of the promises that they will be ready and willing to do so in six months, a year or two years from now will be replaced by similar promises when those dates pass. This is essentially the same Vietnamization policy which failed Richard Nixon in South Vietnam. They had a constitution and a democratically elected government, but that government collapsed after we left, and we’re reduced to watching Bill Clinton visit Ho Chi Minh’s grave, as if Uncle Ho were JFK. In spite of the constitution the Iraqis have and the bravery of many of them who have voted in three elections, I’m convinced that if we withdraw under the existing circumstances, the current Iraqi government won’t last six weeks. It would probably fall apart before the last American left.

I acknowledge there are parallels between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the left, the media and the Iraq study group seem to be nostalgic about the Paris peace talks. Similar efforts to negotiate with Iran, Syria and the sectarian militias in Iraq are certain to be fruitless and ineffective, and worse, propaganda tools for those who hate all Americans, not just President Bush.

We can really only do one of two things. We could follow John McCain’s prescription, send more troops, and take on the Sunni and Shiite militias ourselves. That would essentially require us to reconquer Iraq and to re-instill the fear of us our enemies have lost during this foolish Iraqization phase of the war. On the positive side, it would convince the world we mean business, it might set back the agenda of radical Moslems for a generation, and Iraq might actually become a democratic nation. On the negative side, it’s doubtful we can find enough troops without a draft to impose our will on any nation for very long, there simply isn’t sufficient public support for this undeclared war to fight it successfully, we would be back to the bad old days which inspired the Kent State tragedy at home, and winning the war in Iraq now would be a very bloody proposition, which would require us to be willing to accept many more casualties than we have suffered thus far.

The other option is for us to withdraw our troops from Iraq. If we withdraw from Iraq, it needs to be done immediately, not after events X, Y or Z, events which simply won’t occur if we’re leaving. Of course, I’m aware that our departure will destabilize Iraq and perhaps the entire Middle East. The resulting carnage will be horrible. But if we leave our military in Iraq, without a mission, we’re likely to see the same thing in slow motion, including American casualties, Americans dying for nothing more than the nebulous and unachievable mission of stabilization of an increasingly violent region and an increasingly corrupt government.

There is another risk associated with keeping most of our military tied up in a stalemate in Iraq. 150,000 Americans will be nextdoor to a nuclear Iran.

One might think Americans would be much more united if the war were out of the way, but there are two many other battles in the ongoing culture war in the United States for that to be realistic. The only real beneficiaries of an American withdrawal would be military families themselves. Perhaps it’s worth doing it for them, though I don’t know what it says to the families of those who have already been killed and wounded. We can’t afford, however, to ask more American families to sacrifice their sons and daughters for a war we’re not determined to fight and win.

The chaos in the Middle East may cause the price of oil to go higher than we have ever seen, especially if the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites spreads beyond Iraq. The upsurge in violence will probably be dramatic, and very sad from a human perspective, though one might argue that having Moslems kill each other would make us safer, in some respect. Certainly, we have no inherent reason to prefer one Moslem faction over another.

But the most likely result of an American withdrawal would be similar to Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon. The entire Middle East may become one massive terrorist training camp. That’s not a good thing for us, especially if we are unwilling to enforce our own immigration laws. We will be a very easy target.

My preference would be for us as a nation to unite and have the courage to do whatever is necessary to destroy the insurgent militias in Iraq, but reconvincing Iraqis that the wind will blow our way would be really messy, and I don’t think it’s realistic in the current political climate.

By the way, we need to rid ourselves of the notion that we, or the Israelis, are the problem in the Middle East. Islam is the problem, and Moslems are only continuing to do what they have done for centuries. Anyone who doesn’t believe me should ask themselves why Moslems are murdering those they regard as subhuman pigs in places like Thailand and Sudan, where there is no American presence and it would be even harder to find a Jew. Whenever Islam gains a foothold in a population, Moslems begin terrorizing non-Moslems. There simply isn’t a nation on earth where Moslems in substantial numbers live peaceably with anyone else.

In 1972, Moslem terrorists shocked the world by murdering Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics, even though no one could have believed such an act could achieve any political objective. The world responded by gradually getting used to terrorism and blaming everyone except the terrorists. So they shocked the world again in 1983 by murdering 240 American Marines in Beirut. Americans responded by withdrawing from Lebanon, which inspired more and more attacks, culminating in the September 11 attacks in 2001. Now that we’ve seen the battle against these people is going to be hard and long, we have voted to go back to sleep. But that can only last until the terrorists wake us again, which they’re determined to do.

The Cindy Sheehan crowd keeps telling us to choose peace and not war, but it isn’t always possible to choose peace. Every time dates like September 11 and December 7 come around, we should remember that sometimes evil men thrust war on the rest of us. Perhaps the war in Iraq was optional and perhaps it was a poor choice. But in the long run, war against Moslem fanatics is not an option, it’s a necessity.

At the moment, people who have supported the president look pretty foolish. But somewhere down the road, the two groups of people who will look foolish are the liberals we will have to bury (if we can even find their ashes), and the liberals who survive and have to live with their foolishness.

FULL FRONTAL APOSTASY

I am excited, in a garden of Gethsemane sort of way, about the culture which surrounds us. I recently read an editorial by a man named Kevin McCullough regarding Rick Warren, the pastor of the Saddleback Community megachurch in southern California. For the uninitiated, Warren has recently been the new hero on the block in evangelical circles because of a book called “The Purpose-Driven Life” and the companion “Forty Days of Purpose” program. I went through it myself, but the article I read earlier this week paints a very different picture of Rick Warren. Among other things, the writer says he has invited Democratic senator and heartthrob, Barack Obama, to speak to his church on December 1, which someone has designated World AIDS Day, and the article went on to say Senator Obama openly advocates things which are antithetical to Christianity, including gay marriage and even the most radical forms of abortion–partial birth abortion and the intentional starvation of babies who somehow survive the abortion procedure. If this is true, I hope Mr. Obama and Mr. Warren will have a good time using each other, and I hope they’ll both feel used when they’re finished, unless, of course, one or both of them alters their course.

There was also a recent editorial by a man who says he is a Baptist minister, but he also claims scientific evidence proves that homosexuality is genetically inherited, homosexuals are not to blame for their sexual orientation, the Bible is wrong about homosexuality and must be changed (good luck with that one), and Christians are guilty of persecuting gays and lesbians in cruel and unimaginable ways.

The debate over the root cause of homosexuality is not new, and I don’t want to write about it here, but I found two things about the article interesting. First of all, though he claimed there is a mountain of evidence which proves homosexuality is inherited, not based on choice, and therefore, not sinful, he failed to cite even one study or one piece of data which might have bolstered his argument. I don’t see why all of the solo scriptura people in the world are supposed to drop thousands of years of theology just because he says so. Furthermore, even if everyone comes to believe and it can be proven that homosexuality is caused genetically, hasn’t this minister read Romans 9:11-24, which basically states that God has the right even to create people who he has destined for disobedience and destruction? That’s probably first year seminary material.

Also, there was a recent conference at Vanderbilt’s First Amendment Center in Nashville, at which an unidentified speaker claimed that Christians must give up their belief that Jesus is Lord, the Son of God, the only way to salvation, etc. He said these claims are hindrances which prevent Jews and Moslems from trusting Christians. Yet he never turns the question around and asks why Christians should trust Jews or Moslems who deny the divinity of Jesus, nor did he ask Jews to abandon Moses and Moslems to forget about Mohammed so they could be at peace with Christians. It would seem fair to make the same demands of everyone. I am amazed sometimes how little thought goes into conferences by supposedly learned men. Isn’t it curious that the people at Vanderbilt’s First Amendment Center want to muzzle the free speech of Christians, or anyone for that matter. One would think that a First Amendment Center would encourage everyone to speak up and express their beliefs. It seems to me that their conference was just as much an attack on the first amendment as it was on Christianity.

2 Thessalonians 2:1-4 says that the day of the Lord will not come until after the apostasy comes. The American Heritage dictionary defines apostasy as “the abandonment of one’s religious faith, a political party, one’s principles, or a cause.” In another words, Christ will not return until after an unusually stressful period in which some who have professed to be Christians abandon their faith.

So I’m not writing this to condemn Rick Warren, to complain about anything that happens at Vanderbilt or to get into a debate with a Baptist minister who I am eager to forget about. On the night before Thanksgiving, I am writing this because although the pervasive moral decline around us often seems depressing and it inflicts a great deal of unnecessary pain on people, these days will be shortened. Thanksgiving and Christmas are wonderful holidays, or at least they can be, but my ultimate hope is to see Jesus face to face. The signs of his return, which he spoke of in Matthew 24, are beginning to take place. We are living in increasingly troubled and dangerous times, but eternity will last much longer than these days. Ironically, men such as these are only fulfilling the scriptures they deny.

LOONY IN LOBO LAND

I grew up in Albuquerque, attended school there, worked there, cheered for the local teams, etc., and I’ve missed it ever since my poor job outlook forced me to move. Albuquerque’s climate is dry, but very mild, it has the advantage of being a city without the disadvantages of being a huge urban center. I am a New Mexican through and through, and I can eat the hottest chili peppers in New Mexico as if they were candy. My wife had never been to New Mexico before we got married, but I took her to the top of Sandia Crest the week after our wedding. We’ve made several trips to the mountains of northern New Mexico, to the balloon fiesta, to UNM football and basketball games, and she has now been thoroughly initiated into as many New Mexican things as she is willing to accept, though Mexican food is still somewhat disagreeable to her. For twenty years I was a New Mexican, and to borrowed an over-used expression, “You can take a boy out of New Mexico, but extracting New Mexico from a boy is much more difficult.”

Unfortunately, I am more fond of New Mexico than it is of me. I’m not the first one to notice that I would have to pay out-of-state tuition if I wanted to enroll in any of the state’s universities today, but if I renounce my American citizenship and subsequently sneak into the state from Juarez, I can pay in-state tuition.

The fact that my twenty-year residence in New Mexico entitles me to less than sneaking into a nation and a state I have never visited is troublesome enough, but something else bothers me more. I read on the internet today that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has written a letter to President Bush, asking him to prevent the deportation of an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Though Governor Richardson is hispanic, this shouldn’t be one of his top concerns since the woman in question isn’t in New Mexico, she is in Chicago.

She has a seven-year-old son who was born in the United States. She was working at O’hare International Airport in Chicago as a cleaning woman, when it was discovered she was using a fake Social Security number, probably someone else’s, though the article did not say so specifically. For a moment, please put aside the argument that her deportation would force her either to take her son, a U.S. citizen, to Mexico, or to go to Mexico without him. Also, let’s forget for a moment the argument about Mexicans taking jobs Americans won’t do (perhaps governing New Mexico is also one of them), and let’s even forget for a moment about her immigration status. Let’s cut to the chase and focus on the central fact that a state governor is appealing to the president of the United States on behalf of a woman who is guilty of at least dishonesty, and perhaps identity theft.

First of all, I wonder if Governor Richardson would appeal to the president for me if I used someone else’s Social Security number. My guess is he would not do so, because he would soon find out I am not hispanic, and only hispanics are entitled to be rewarded for their dishonesty.

What if I were the CEO of a major corporation, and I falsified financial statements in order to make my company’s stock go up, the sort of dishonesty Kenneth Lay was convicted for? Would Governor Richardson appeal to President Bush on my behalf? Of course not, because he would conclude that I was a rich, dishonest Republican. Rich, dishonest Republicans deserve to be punished because they’re dishonest, not because they’re rich, nor because they’re Republicans. But clearly, the dishonesty portion of this story means nothing to Bill Richardson, who wants to be president of these United States. Governor Richardson shouldn’t count on my support, but he can count on my opposition! Justice is supposed to be blind, not caring about anything except the legality, ethics and behavior of those who appeal to it. When justice begins to open its eyes and make judgments based on class, social standing, ethnic background, gender, religion or anything else, it fails us all. My problem with the woman in Chicago is not that she’s hispanic; my problem with her is that’s she’s dishonest, and she refuses to follow rules I’m expected to follow. Whether or not she is deported to Mexico, I question why her plight should be the concern of any of our elected officials.

By the way, this story came to Governor Richardson’s attention because this woman’s seven-year-old son was flown to Mexico City to appeal to Mexico’s legislature to pass a resolution that we should not deport poor Mexicans back to poor Mexico, and they passed the resolution, not because they care about the poor, but because they are hell-bent on an ethnic invasion of the United States. Most seven-year-olds are still learning to read and trying to color consistently between the lines. Making weighty political arguments is rare for their age group. I wonder who paid for the trip. Was it someone else besides the mother, who has been hiding in a church since August? Why is a church hiding her? How can they ask anyone to obey the laws of an invisible God when they won’t obey the laws of visible men?

It also should be pointed out to Governor Richardson that if our immigration system is broken, it has been broken by Mexicans and other illegals, not by us. Whatever we decide to do with people like this, they need to be reminded that their dilemma is a dilemma of their own creation. If it’s possible to understand why Mexicans are willing to risk coming here as illegals, it should be possible for them to understand that their desire to leave Mexico is because of Mexico’s failure, not ours. If we deport Mexicans, they should understand we are well within our rights to do so. If we decide to give them a path to citizenship, that is mercy on our part, not a debt we owe them.

BLACK AND WHITE

Because I was born prematurely, my lungs were not fully developed and I could not breathe on my own, I was placed in an airtight incubator after birth. Either the oxygen in the incubator burned my eyes, or the lighting in the nursery for newborns caused me to become totally blind.

I mention that, only so I can tell the following story. On Wednesday, the news included a story about the passing of “60 Minutes” reporter Ed Bradley. The story mentioned the fact that Ed Bradley was black, which I was unaware of, though I knew who he was for many years.

I mentioned this to my wife, who began giving me names and asking whether I suspected they were white or black. I guessed everyone she asked me about correctly, but I’m sure I would be wrong from time to time.

In the 1980s, I mentioned to a friend that I had heard an interview with a once-popular singer, who sounded very bitter when he said the following, “Back in 1957, when I had two of the biggest hits in the country, no one would let me sing publicly anywhere.” I asked her why he wouldn’t have been able to sing anywhere, and my friend informed me that Johnny Mathis is black. To tell the truth, I had always assumed that a man with that voice, doing that kind of music, was a blonde, blue-eyed caucasian. Conversely, I would have suspected that Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers is black, had it not been for the constant references by disc jockeys to blue-eyed soul.

The point of my story is this. Sometimes I wish God would show me all of the visual things I have missed in this life. On the other hand, it’s kind of cool to live in a world in which Aretha Franklin could be white. Martin Luther King’s dream that someday everyone will be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin, is a reality with me, because I can never be absolutely sure who’s who.

THE SINKING SHIP OF STATE

I remember watching the Grammys in 1980. It was referred to as the night disco died, a night when there were suddenly no awards for artists like Donna Summer, who had been all the rage just the year before. In a similar fashion, last night conservative America died, and like the disco music of the 70s, it may never recover. To misquote Richard Nixon, “You won’t have this elephant to kick around anymore.”

Of course, I’m aware that there will be another election in two years, and presumably another election every two years after that. One might assume that since the political process will probably continue indefinitely, the ebb and flow of political fortunes will allow conservatives to regain at least limited control of the government at some point in the future.

Perhaps Republicans will win elections again, but it won’t be the same sort of Republicans. First of all, the immediate result of the animosity toward President Bush will probably prevent any real conservative from running for president, which is why the current Republican front runners for the 2008 nomination are media darlings like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, who are really only conservative on one or two issues.

As I argued in my previous post, the most effective part of the government for the past two years has been the Republicans in the House of Representatives. I say this because the house Republicans are the only elected officials who have cared about illegal immigration. With the Democrats firmly in control of both houses of Congress, and a lame duck president who doesn’t care about this issue, our border will only become more porous. The result of our unwillingness to enforce our immigration laws is that we will be importing more Mexican gangs and more and more Arab terrorists. Yesterday’s election did much to hasten the next major terrorist attack on American soil. Get ready for Colombian-style drug wars right here in the United states, too, or perhaps we’ll just legalize drugs so we can tax them, we’ll become a nation of addicts and drug dealers will become billionaires. Furthermore, if it’s “impossible” to deport 12 million illegal aliens, it’s even more “impossible” to deport 20 million, 30 million or 40 million. Even if 40% of these newcomers are willing to vote Republican, the 60% that won’t may lead us to a situation where we could have one party in power for 70 years, as Mexico did until recently.

Democrats will always support open borders, because they know there simply isn’t a vast reservoir of self-reliant conservatives in Mexico, or anywhere else, who will sneak into the country, work hard, vote Republican, and turn down government handouts. Republicans will win elections again, but the 1994 “contract with America” Republicans are gone forever.

Some claim a divided government will be better for all of us, because it will force conservatives and liberals to work together. Sometimes in the past, that may have been true. But the schism between the right and the left is now so deep that a divided government will not only be paralyzed, it will be a little bit like adding bleach to an ice cream cone. Furthermore, because the next president is likely to be much more liberal than the current one and because of the continuing flood of illegals into the country, I suspect our divided government will be replaced by a liberal government after the next election.

Throughout the year I have heard some saying, “George Bush isn’t a real conservative. Real conservatives can still win elections.” But a lot of real conservative candidates and real conservative issues took a beating yesterday. Yes, it’s the mood of the moment, but it’s also a trend.

With both houses of Congress firmly in Democratic hands, the government will be paralyzed by impeachment hearings and endless investigations for the next two years. It’s going to be a painful time for all but the most venomous of liberals, which, come to think of it, is about half of us.

Any possibility of overturning the Roe vs. Wade decision now may be gone forever. The only hope in that regard right now is that the positions currently held by retiring or dying liberal justices will simply be left vacant until a more liberal president and Congress agree to turn the court further to the left.

Gay marriage (and probably other marriage variants) are now just on the horizon. There will always be unusual families, but it doesn’t bode well for a society when the oddest family form is children who are being raised by their married biological parents, and that’s where we are headed. We’re all familiar with the story that a frog can be boiled by putting it in a pan of cold water and increasing the temperature gradually. The frog will boil to death instead of jumping out of the pan. A lot of social changes occur that way, because people get tired of defending conservative positions. I haven’t seen the final results, but last night the “marriage consists of one man and one woman” proposition in Arizona was losing, though similar ballot measures were routinely getting about 70% of the vote just two years ago. I suspect such a referendum during the lives of my grandparents would have yielded a nearly unanimous vote. So even if a marriage between three brothers, two sisters and a dog shocks us today, it may not shock our children. It may not even seem odd to them.

Even if one assumes Democrats won’t try to increase taxes and they simply let the Bush tax cuts expire, get ready for the government to stick its federal hand deeper and deeper into your personal pockets. The deeper they reach, the more dependent we all become on government services, which is exactly what they’re hoping for, and it’s exactly what Americans voted for yesterday.

On another note, yesterday was the fourth consecutive election which enriched large teams of lawyers. Al Gore’s real legacy probably won’t have anything to do with global warming, but rather with his determination to destroy our collective confidence in the democratic process itself. I was almost amused yesterday when the charges of voter intimidation, not enough ballots, broken voting machines, etc., began flying fast and furious, long before the polls were closed anywhere. Maybe the lawyers will have less and less to do in the future, though, if the new Democratic majority balloons into landslide proportions.

No matter how anyone feels about the war in Iraq, we Americans would do well to remember at least a few highlights from our recent history. In 1983, a truck bomb killed 240 Marines in Lebanon. Although we had troops in Lebanon, they weren’t fighting anyone, they were simply trying to keep the Beirut airport open. That did not prevent them from becoming the targets of the worst terrorist attack on Americans at that time. President Reagan responded by pulling our Marines out of Lebanon, in the hope that if we left others alone, they would leave us alone. But Americans continued to be kidnapped and sometimes killed throughout the 1980s.

In the 1990s, there were several unprovoked attacks on our military, most notably in Somalia, from which we retreated. The first attempt was made to destroy the World Trade Center, and this attack on American soil prompted us to do absolutely nothing. So no matter how we feel about the war in Iraq, we should all have a post-9/11 mindset, and none of us should suppose that terrorism won’t be a problem anymore if we just curl up and go to sleep. Yet that is exactly what we voted to do yesterday, when we voted for people who want both to withdraw from the Middle East and to do nothing about our lack of border enforcement and other gaping holes in our security at home. Back in the 1960s, I sometimes wondered what things would be like if hippies ruled the world. Now we’re going to find out, because too many of my generation would rather frolic in the mud at Yasgar’s farm than deal with the realities of the world around us.

Since I originally posted this on Tuesday morning, Donald Rumsfeld has been forced out as Secretary of Defense, and it appears John Bolton is on his way out at the U.N. With regard to the U.N., corruption can continue as usual, without any irritating interruptions from the American representative. As for Rumsfeld, he is being replaced by Robert Gates. We’ll have to see what emerges as the new foreign policy with regard to Iraq, but what I’m hearing is that Mr. Gates will preside over a new policy of forming a regional partnership to stabilize Iraq, a partnership which will include Iran and Syria. Asking for help in Iraq from Iran and Syria is sort of like putting two rattlesnakes in a baby’s crib and asking them to behave.

In any case, it’s clear we don’t have the will or the manpower to win in Iraq, and the next two years will involve some kind of arrangement to make our defeat as graceful as possible. If we enjoyed Saigon in 1975, we’ll love Baghdad in 2007 or 2008. Aside from the obvious problems with allowing the entire Middle East to become a terrorist laboratory, what will turning Iraq over to whoever wants it say to the American soldiers who have served there? I know what it would say to me. “You shouldn’t have volunteered, and you should get out as soon as possible.” That’s not a good message to send to our troops if we don’t want a draft.

What did Tuesday’s election say to the people of Taiwan? In a word, it said goodbye. Unless they are God’s other chosen people, they will soon be the official property of the People’s Republic of China. My guess is that George Bush isn’t the world’s only cowboy, and we’ll soon find that there are cowboys in Beijing too.

Surprisingly, since the election, the most irritating thing to me has not been gloating Democrats, Europeans, Arabs or the mainstream media. The most irritating thing of all has been to hear a chorus of conservatives complaining that Republicans “deserved to lose”. Certainly we are all deeply flawed human beings, and perhaps no one deserves to win an election. Republicans, from the president on down, have made a number of mistakes in recent years.

However, the reason Republicans are now the minority in the Senate is because one Republican carelessly uttered the word “macaca”. Whatever a macaca is, and no matter how inappropriate the usage of the word may have been, it hardly seems to justify the new reality that President Bush will no longer be able to nominate conservatives to the Supreme Court. Saying macaca ten thousand times cannot possibly justify the continuing practice of sucking the brains out of fully developed babies. No matter how lurid and disgusting Mark Foley’s instant messages and his hypocrisy may have been, it hardly justifies throwing the only Americans who wanted to protect our borders out of office. The next time someone says Republicans abandoned their conservative principles, please remind them what Americans chose to replace them with.

Yet perhaps there is a silver lining in this cloud. I am a born-again, right-wing nut who votes for conservatives in the hope that God’s will will be done on earth, as we are told it is done in heaven. In the first century, Christianity did not take root in a society Ozzie and Harriet would have been comfortable with, but rather in a decadent Roman society, whose leaders usually murdered their political rivals, demanded they themselves be worshipped as gods, and fed Christians to the lions. Yet Christianity flourished under the pressure of that environment. Perhaps Christianity will do better in America if it’s under real pressure, perhaps pastors will quit seeking out gay prostitutes and quit preaching to others about passions they don’t control in their own lives, and perhaps Christ himself will decide to bring his authority to earth and separate the sheep from the goats forever. I can’t deny that watching the U.S.A. sink into the trash can of history bothers me every day, but there is a heavenly citizenship which is even more desirable than my American citizenship. I will not stop participating in the political process, as long as I have the right and the opportunity to do so, but I will focus more and more on a higher calling as my American citizenship continues to devalue itself.

DIVIDED WE FALL

If the pre-election polls are to be believed, Republicans will lose control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections, but they may, by the narrowest of margins, retain control of the senate. Some say that divided government is good, harnessing the power of both parties and preventing extremism. But will it really?

If the justification for a divided government is the lack of progress in Iraq, bringing Democrats into the majority in any branch of government cannot bring progress; voting against weapons the military needs will not bring progress. Neither will endless rounds of hearings about the justification for an ongoing war, which we cannot afford to lose, unless we want to fight a larger war against a stronger enemy later.

If the justification for a divided government is that the economy in parts of the country is depressed, higher taxes will not resolve that problem, and higher taxes are what a Democratic majority promises. Generally, the economy is doing quite well, higher taxes will put the breaks on economic expansion, and they may not even help shrink the federal deficit.

If Republicans lose the house, we will have lost the most effective portion of our government, the only branch of the government which has cared about our southern border with Mexico. Giving the house to Democrats is giving the border, or perhaps the whole nation, to Mexican gangs and Arab terrorists. It isn’t a very good reward for moderation.

Perhaps we want to punish Republicans because gas prices are still high, even though they have fallen significantly in the last couple of months. Perhaps that’s just a Republican election year conspiracy. If so, I’m in favor of the conspiracy, and I would like the conspiracy to continue. But instead, we could vote for Democrats, who won’t drill for oil anywhere, who loathe nuclear power, new power plants, coal, and every other energy alternative which doesn’t come from the Middle East. We could vote for them, but it would be foolish to do so.

Perhaps we want to punish Republicans for FEMA’s slow response to Katrina. But if last year’s weather was President Bush’s fault, why hasn’t anyone congratulated him for this year’s hurricaneless hurricane season? If there is a God (I’m personally quite confident in the existence of the Almighty), perhaps he just doesn’t like Al Gore. If the Almighty has shunned Al Gore repeatedly for the past several years, should we vote for all of his friends?

Perhaps we want to balance the political power of those who are pro-life and those who are pro-choice. Perhaps we call it moderation when even ten-year-old girls receive abortions without anyone consulting their parents. That’s moderation I will never vote for.

Moderation will bring us a world where marriage is redefined, and then destroyed. If any two people can marry, and if any two people can raise children equally effectively, why can’t three or four do it? Why can’t brothers and sisters marry and have children? All of those arrangements, and many more, will become civil rights obligations of society, if gay marriage goes forward. Until someone finds a better formula for marriage than one man and one woman and a better formula for parenthood than a mother and a father, I’ll vote for whichever party will uphold the institution of the family.

After the Tet offensive in 1968, Americans collectively did not turn to Eugene McCarthy out of frustration with the war in Vietnam. Instead, Americans turned to the more hawkish Richard Nixon. To date, we’ve only lost about 5% as many people in Iraq as we lost in Vietnam, yet we may now be ready to turn over portions of the government to people who probably would not support World War II, if it were being held today. I’m frustrated and discontent with the status of things in Iraq too. If one doesn’t support staying the course in Iraq, please articulate a good alternative. I haven’t heard one yet. More importantly, there are scores of other issues where conservatives must win, unless we truly want to give up on the family as the basic building block of society, and unless we want to give up what’s left of our faith, our freedom and our national sovereignty.

Just as one cannot mix marriage and adultery, a little honesty and a little theft, telling the truth and lying, a divided government will make all of us less safe. The left blames America for all of the world’s ills, and we will find out tomorrow whether we are willing to become the first nation in the history of mankind which officially hates itself. Not even the Nazis hated themselves. Should we?

REDEFINING PARENTHOOD

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about gay marriage, or rather, about redefining marriage so that it isn’t necessarily a heterosexual union. But another, less frequently discussed, issue walks hand and hand with it, the redefinition of parenthood. I mention this because of an AP story this morning which announces that Melissa Etheridge, and her lesbian lover, Tammy Lynn Michaels, have become the parents of twins.

Even the AP story manages to acknowledge that women have not figured out how to impregnate each other, saying that the father of the twins is an anonymous sperm donor. I was scared for a moment, worrying that men really have become unnecessary. But the AP story does not even attempt to answer the obvious question about whether the sperm donor deliberately donated sperm for this purpose, or whether he even knew it was possible that his donation would be used in this way.

The story goes on to say that Melissa Etheridge and Tammy Lynn Michaels had a “commitment ceremony” in 2003 (sorry I missed it), and Melissa Etheridge has two children from another relationship with an ex-lesbian lover named Julie Cypher. Obviously, they didn’t impregnate each other either. Those two children were actually the products of a sperm donation by David Crosby. I wonder if he was paid for the donation, and if he spent the money buying drugs.

Now for some additional questions the AP failed to ask, in its glowing attempt to parrot a Hollywood publicity release. If Melissa’s commitment to Tammy turns out to be just as temporary as her commitment to Julie was, does she have an equal right to Tammy’s twins, who she did not biologically father or mother? Of course, legal conflicts between the rights of biological parents and day to day caregiving parents exist in the heterosexual world, too. But my point here is that we’re losing the ability to even define what a parent is, particularly if the rights of parents who are both biological parents and caregivers become, in some cases, subservient to other caregiving parents, if we can call them parents, who just happen to want the children.

Now let’s reverse the question. If Melissa and Tammy split up at some point, does Tammy have an equal right to the children Melissa and Julie thought they had had, the ones David Crosby fathered, presumably without any physical contact with Melissa? The courts will have to decide whether those children belong to Tammy, to Melissa, to Julie, or to David Crosby. What if they all want these kids? Trying to figure this out gives me a headache.

Let’s take this in another direction. Back in the 1990s, a boy in Florida “divorced” his parents. What if Tammy’s new twins decide years from now to “divorce” Tammy and Melissa, and they want to find their anonymous sperm-donating father?

Let me ask one last question, which has apparently never occurred to the so-called journalists at the AP. Whatever David Crosby’s talent as a musician may be, his drug use is legendary. Back in the 1980s, I often talked to friends who said they did not expect him to live much longer. Fortunately, he has beaten the odds, and I’m happy for him that he has. But it seems very possible to me that he may pass on a genetic predisposion to addiction to his children, or even more likely, that the drugs he has taken through the years have caused him to pass other abnormalities to these kids? Can he be held legally responsible for damage he may have done to children he isn’t even raising?

Who benefits from all of this craziness? Lawyers have got to be just thrilled about it, as well as homosexuals, who don’t want us to have any rules or any common understanding about what marriage is or what a parent is. In any case, don’t expect to learn anything from the mainstream press, whose complete lack of curiousity is as large as Texas and as relentless as an Alaskan winter.

IS IT TIME TO PULL THE PLUG?

In one of the presidential debates in 2000 between Al Gore and George Bush, President Bush said, “The military exists to fight and to win wars. It does not exist to do peacekeeping or nation building.” Yet, after a brilliantly executed invasion of Iraq, the military finds itself in the latter role. As President Bush accurately predicted in 2000, the military did an extraordinarily good job during the invasion phase of the war in Iraq, but we should all agree at this point that the occupation has not gone well. Initially, when Iraqis pulled down statues of Saddam Hussein, and later when they courageously voted in spite of threats to their lives, it appeared that we might be successful in inspiring the first democracy in the Arab world.

During the occupation, we have pursued a policy very similar to President Nixon’s Vietnamization policy. Though I haven’t heard anyone use the term Iraqization, our policy has been to allow the Iraqi government to become strong enough that it would defeat the insurgency. I wish that were happening, but it appears that the same policy which failed in Vietnam is failing in Iraq.

So we Americans have a choice to make. President Bush says we cannot afford to cut and run, because Iraq will become a breeding ground for terrorism, and that terrorism will reach our shores. Based on the recent history of Lebanon, it is reasonable to conclude that the president is correct, and the consequences of the war in Iraq are far more serious than whatever we did or failed to do in Vietnam.

On the other hand, if the Iraqis cannot quell the sectarian violence and bring order and stability to Iraq, we will have to do it ourselves. Doing it ourselves will require many more casualties than we’ve had thus far. If we take the fight against radical Moslems to every village in Iraq, our casualties in Iraq will probably surpass the casualties of the Vietnam era. That’s a very high price to pay for a nation which has an all-volunteer military, and I’m still not sure what the final outcome would be, though it is certain that even one free and open Arab society would be a vast improvement to the existing Middle East.

I have not lost confidence in our president or in our military, whose boldness, courage, vision and decisiveness are admirable. I have lost confidence in the Iraqis themselves, and I certainly have no confidence in our media or in our national will. To the extent that the November 7 election is a referendum between staying the course and cutting and running, we will soon find out what our national will is. I am afraid that Americans are short-term thinkers, and that we will choose to minimize our short-term casualties, thereby maximizing our long-term problem with radical Islam. Sometimes pain is the only path men are willing to take in the acquisition of wisdom.

POOR CHOICES, POOR RESULTS

This morning I heard that two of our border patrol agents in El Paso are going to prison for shooting a drug smuggler and trying to cover it up. They claimed they were acting in self-defense, but a jury of their peers apparently didn’t think so. I haven’t heard the evidence in the case, and I certainly wasn’t on the jury. But I have some obvious questions about the results. Why shouldn’t these men get medals for shooting a drug smuggler? I don’t even care if they shot him in the back. After 40 years of increasing drug use, how can we possibly fail to understand what drugs do to individuals, to families, to the crime rate and to society in general? Furthermore, why should anyone want to work for the border patrol if we don’t want them to be successful in their efforts to prevent illegal drugs and illegal immigrants into the country? Are we prepared to pay the price for their failure?

The Department of Homeland Security released a report this week which says that perhaps as many as ten million illegal immigrants came to the United States just last year. We cannot possibly afford that sort of influx on an annual basis. Why has this report been buried by the mainstream media, and why is it that neither of our major political parties are concerned about a report which says that our border with Mexico is now being run by Mexican drug cartels, who have grenade launchers, bazookas and other weapons which no local police force has, and which our border patrol doesn’t have? Are we prepared to pay the price for not defending ourselves against these people? Our forefathers would be ashamed of us. It reminds me of the history of the Roman empire, which, in its latter stages was constantly being invaded by foreigners who sacked Rome repeatedly until the remnants of the western part of the empire collapsed. The point is that no nation will exist very long which doesn’t control its borders. I learned that in third grade, so why have so few of our leaders learned it?

On another subject, the Census Bureau released a report earlier this week, which indicates that there are now 55.2 million American households headed by married couples. But there are 55.8 households headed by single mothers, single fathers, cohabiting heterosexuals and cohabiting homosexuals, and there are 30 million adults who are living alone. The point of the report is that traditional families are now the minority versus other non-traditional family structures for the first time.

When I read about this report, it occurred to me that the situation is actually much more grim than the report indicates. For example, I know a lady, who, along with her husband, have finished raising two children of his from a former marriage, a child of hers born out of wedlock, and they now have adopted someone else’s crack baby. This report would have classified them as a traditional family. No matter how common blended families are, they are not traditional. I’m not knocking the courageous efforts made by many single parents and by parents in blended families. But I do wonder if any nation has survived very long after allowing the traditional family structure to become uncommon. Again, grade school history teaches that empires are built by nations with strong families, and empires collapse when those nations no longer have strong families.

If there was an award for the villains of the week, though, it might go to the six New York state supreme court justices who ruled unanimously that Catholic charities must provide contraception (and presumably abortion services) to their employees. Without any legal precedent and without any public referendum, the right of Catholics to sincerely practice their religion has become illegal. No one should assume that this will be confined to Catholics, or to New York.

When I consider these stories together, it makes me ask another question. Would General George S. Patton be willing to fight for this generation of Americans? Would he ask the troops under his command to give their lives for the freedoms of any of the four college football teams who participated in brawls with each other last weekend? Would the men of the greatest generation storm the beaches at Normandy or fight at Iwo Jima for a nation whose ex-president had an affair with an intern, or some of whose Congressmen have had sexual relations, or exchanged explicit text messages with Congressional pages? Would they gladly make the ultimate sacrifice for Catholic priests who fondle and get naked with altar boys? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but it seems to me that explicit in the sacrifices of our forefathers, of whatever generation, was the belief that we would use the freedoms they preserved for us for more noble causes.

WITCH HUNTERS

What do George Bush, Dick Cheney, Clarence Thomas, Donald Rumsfeld, Newt Gingridge, Trent Lott, Tom Delay, George Allen, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Bennett, Ann Coulter, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Dr. Laura Schlessinger and now Dennis Hastert all have in common? Are they all part of a “culture of corruption”, a Republican hall of shame?

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that they’re all jerks, and that, along with Mark Foley, they all deserve whatever happens to them. If so, the logical next question is “Are there any good Republicans?” If one is a liberal Democrat, are there Republicans, who, though one may disagree with their politics, are, nevertheless, decent and honorable people?

Certainly all human beings, including the ones I’ve mentioned here, contribute at times to their own problems. But I pose the “Are there any good Republicans?” question, because it appears to me that no one who is a conservative in this country could ever possibly be squeaky-clean enough to pacify the witch hunters on the left. Liberals may counter that Republicans went after Bill Clinton, and that’s true, though Mr. Clinton contributed mightily to his own misfortunes. But Bill Clinton is just one guy, and one guy does not establish a pattern. There is no comparable witch hunt, directed deliberately at target after target on the left.

I’ve heard all my life about the evils of McCarthyism, but Joe McCarthy was just one man, and he wasn’t even supported by Dwight Eisenhower, a fellow Republican, when he claimed there were Communists in the army. Comparing McCarthyism with what happens to conservatives these days is like comparing roller skates with the space shuttle.

If he did what he has been accused of doing, goodbye and good riddins to Mark Foley. But the current Congressional firestorm can only be properly understood as one more tree in a large forest of character assassination which has been directed toward Republicans and advocates of conservative causes, which has expanded and escalated from the Watergate era until today. It’s not about Mark Foley anymore. Instead, it has become another in a long series of attempts to end the careers of Republicans and conservatives and to tear apart their leadership, even when those leaders are the duely elected representatives of the public.

Conservatives may think that liberals only hate George Bush, because of the war in Iraq and the outcome of the disputed 2000 election. But the true objective of today’s McCarthyism is much wider and deeper than that. The objective is to force anyone with traditional values into a closet from which they can never emerge, and to intimidate them into silence.

To illustrate my point, consider what happened to Anita Bryant three decades ago. In the 1970s, she was the spokesperson for Florida orange juice, and she was probably the most recognizable representative for any product. She went, as a private citizen, to a city council meeting, where she said she was opposed to an anti-discrimination bill regarding homosexuals. She was not opposed to them having jobs, but she just wanted the city to allow people to express concerns on a case by case basis. As a result of her political incorrectness and her Christian faith, she was viciously attacked in the press. Orange juice sales went up, but the Florida Citrus Association, bowing to intense political pressure, dropped her as a spokesperson, effectively ending her career. She received death threats, and ill-mannered people mailed their excrement to her. The stress on her contributed to the collapse of her marriage, so she went through a divorce and an eventual remarriage. Her evangelical allies dumped her, because they disapproved of her divorce. She has now been in hiding for about 25 years, maintaining a lower profile than most earthworms. Florida’s citrus growers have never really recovered either, since Anita Bryant was never replaced, and orange juice commercials have vanished from the air waves. Whether or not one agrees with Anita Bryant about homosexuality, this shouldn’t happen in a nation where the freedom to express one’s opinion is supposed to be a fundamental right.

Anita Bryant’s experience was not just an isolated event; it has been duplicated over and over again. I can’t even describe how ridiculous it seems to me that Dennis Hastert’s career may soon come to an end, because he was not fully aware of the private motivations of one of the 225 members of the House of Representatives. Anyone who has tried to run a meeting should know it’s impossible for one person to completely control and oversee the actions, much less the motives and private communications, of 225 people. Consider for a moment how many assistant coaches baseball, football and basketball teams have. None of those teams have 225 members, but they have a job to do, a job which is inevitably too large for one person to facilitate.

As disgusting as the allegations against Mark Foley may be, it’s worth noting that in the 1980s, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts (where else) got a Congressional page drunk and had sex with him. Stotts was censured by the house, but he never resigned, and no one ever asked what the Democratic leadership knew and when they knew it. Stotts was re-elected several times after the scandal. Note that Stotts didn’t just send a page a letter indicating that sex with him would be fun, he actually did something about it. There was apparently no difference between his motives and Mark Foley’s, but the experiences of the pages involved was very different, since one became a real victim. How nice it would be if Ted Kennedy had just sent Mary Jo Kopechne a text message saying he would like to drown her, and the message would become a national scandal. Then she would still be alive, and he would be out of the senate. No one would have even tried to impeach Bill Clinton if he had just sent Monica Lewinsky a text message indicating that sexual contact with her would be fun. In the end, even the stained dress didn’t matter.

It is no accident that the two frontrunners for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination are John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, neither of whom are conservatives. Being a well-known conservative in the United States today is every bit as dangerous as being Jewish in Nazi Germany was, except that the gas chambers and the re-education camps haven’t been set up yet. My point is that a loud and clear message has been sent to conservatives. “Don’t speak up, or we’ll ruin you. We’ll throw slime at you until something sticks, and no punishment for the crimes we accuse you of will be considered too great. Don’t pick up that cross, because we’ll nail you to it.” One crucifixion is enough for me, and the constant demand for new victims ought to concern all of us, no matter what our political beliefs are. Conservatives had better learn to stick together and get some gumption, unless they want to be picked off one at a time.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

Early one evening, during the early 1990s, I was aimlessly turning the a.m. dial on a radio when I passed Dallas radio station KRLD. It just happened that the part-owner of the Texas Rangers was being interviewed, a man named George W. Bush. I assumed at the time that he had chosen to become a professional sports team owner, rather than to go into politics, and I often wonder if he doesn’t secretly wish now he had just stuck with baseball.

My first thoughts about the man who is now our president had nothing to do with politics. My first impression of him was that he is an unusually affable and congenial person, the sort of person most of us would enjoy being around, and I retain that impression of him today. It seemed odd to me to like him, because I had always felt almost completely neutral about the elder George Bush, and I did not vote for his re-election in 1992. I had never had any particular fondness for the Bush family, nor for the Texas Rangers, until that day. Apart from political considerations, I would rather spend a day with George and Laura Bush than with any of the other nine presidents and first ladies I am old enough to remember.

Recently, Hugo Chavez informed us that this same George Bush is the devil. That’s hardly a surprise, because our own press, the anti-American American press, has been telling us the same thing for six years. In a sense, Mr. Chavez deserves to be congratulated for saying it better than they do. Based on the audio clips I’ve heard, it got a lot of laughs at the U.N.’s general assembly, and a similar speech apparently got him a standing ovation at a New York college, and I suspect Hugo Chavez is more popular than George Bush on most of our campuses. He is certainly more popular than President Bush is with America’s university faculties. I was mildly amused when a few prominent Democrats actually felt obliged to defend the president from the Chavez rhetoric, though I’m not at all certain they actually disagree with him about anything.

During one of the 2000 presidential debates with Al Gore, President Bush said our military exists to fight and win wars, not to keep the peace. Those words seem oddly prophetic now. I think we all have to acknowledge now that the invasion of Iraq was an amazing success, but the occupation has been a failure. I must confess that I am far less optimistic about the president’s enduring legacy than I was even two years ago. By November, American troops will have been in Iraq for three years and eight months, the same period of time it took for the United States to defeat the Axis powers in World War II. Even though I view the mainstream media with Texas-sized skepticism, it is true that they are not inventing the daily casualties in Iraq. The daily stories of car bombs, murders, mutilations and torture really do matter, because they indicate that neither we, nor the Iraqi government, have been able to quell the sectarian violence. Things will certainly get worse in Iraq if we leave. We have caused Iraqis to vote for a government and a constitution. What I think is necessary now is a referendum on our presence there. If most Iraqis want us out, we ought to leave, and they deserve the civil war they’ll have. If they want Americans to stay, they will have to do the majority of what’s necessary to make their citizens safer, and they will have to do it soon. We ought to tell them, in no uncertain terms, that the failure to keep the peace there will be their failure, not ours, and we need to remember that Saddam Hussein was filling up mass graves when he was still in power. The violence in Iraq didn’t just begin when we got there.

Some argue that the war in Iraq has made us less safe, because it is inspiring more would-be terrorists, and some argue, as the president does, that we’re keeping terrorists occupied there, which gives them less opportunity and fewer resources with which to plan another direct attack on the United States. No one is in a position to know for certain which view is more accurate. However, judging by Israel’s experience in withdrawing from Lebanon in 2000, an American withdrawal from Iraq would probably only mean that both we and they would have a window in time to strengthen ourselves in preparation for a larger and more decisive conflict in the future. Yet, if we are unable to control the violence in Iraq, remaining there has few benefits.

For nearly four years, I have heard the liberal mantra, “No one died when Clinton lied.” They conveniently forget Vince Foster, Ron Brown, Jim McDougal, a lot of children in Waco, and the people in Iraq, Afghanistan and what used to be Yugoslavia, who Bill Clinton felt obliged to bomb when it turned out that he really had had an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

No one has any real reason to believe that President Bush misled anyone when he said Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In the nine months prior to the war, those weapons may have been moved or destroyed, many of them may have been found, but they were conveniently ignored by our so-called journalists, or the president may have relied on faulty intelligence, as President Kennedy did when he supported the Bay of Pigs invasion. He may have gotten some egg on his face, but no one said he lied, no one called him the devil, and the press didn’t attack him relentlessly on a daily basis. He was their boy.

Aside from accusing President Bush of lying without any substantiating evidence, some have actually accused him of plotting the September 11, 2001 attack himself. If I understand this correctly, President Bush, who has said that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, managed to talk 19 Moslems into doing this for Allah. If George Bush could have pulled that off, he’s not as stupid as they say he is. So, since this accusation is clearly preposterous, let’s add falsely accusing the president of plotting the murders of three thousand Americans to the resume of his critics.

Back in 2000, when the recounts in Florida kept going his way and Democrats were suing each other in an effort to get more favorable recounts, they said George Bush cheated his way into office, and the Supreme Court made him president. Never mind that their networks falsely gave Florida to Al Gore before the polls closed in the Florida panhandle, perhaps depriving the president of 10,000 additional votes. When he got more than three million votes more than John Kerry in 2004, they kept saying he cheated again. George Bush is a clever fellow, if he managed to cheat his way into office twice. Ted Kennedy cheated at Harvard, why aren’t they friends? President Bush wasn’t really even clever enough to cheat the Texas Rangers into the playoffs.

President Bush has been blamed for the weather, but he never gets credit when the weather is nice. When gas prices go up, it’s his fault. When they go down, it’s a conspiracy to get more votes in November. No wonder Jeb doesn’t want to be president. Jeb is the really clever one, because he doesn’t want all of the abuse his brother has taken.

HE DOESN’T FEEL YOUR PAIN

I remember watching a newscast late in 1992, soon after Bill Clinton was elected president, but before he took office. I don’t recall what the story was about, but I was struck by how irritable and angry our future president was. I’ve never liked former president Clinton, but it never really has had much of anything to do with his politics. Though Bill Clinton has always been totally committed to the abortion cause, I really don’t believe there are many other issues about which he is deeply committed. So in pure ideological terms, I have deep disagreements with him, but not as many disagreements as I have with most liberal Democrats.

Clinton fans constantly remind the rest of us, as one did this morning, that Bill Clinton is a Rhodes scholar. Actually, he was a Fulbright scholar, and the late Senator Fulbright was never one of my heroes. I freely acknowledge Bill Clinton is an intelligent and charismatic man, and he is a very effective speaker, particularly when he isn’t telling the truth, such as was the case with his “I believe abortion should be safe, legal and rare.” quote. Everyone who heard him say it knew he cared a great deal about “legal”, but very little about “safe” or “rare”. Yet it was such a comforting misrepresentation of his views that very few Americans reacted to it with the disgust they would normally feel when they know someone is lying to them.

Yet it is not Bill Clinton, as a politician, clever and deceptive as he is, which I’ve always had problems with. Rather, it has been my constant impression that in spite of his intelligence, he is emotionally immature, perhaps childish would be a better word.

While he was president, I found his frequent fits of temper to be extremely inappropriate, given that he had the ability at any moment to order the launch of nuclear weapons which could kill millions of people. It seems we would want a very calm person in that position, not someone given to sudden losses of self-control.

Since his interview with Chris Wallace on Fox last Sunday, there has been a lot of trash talking about whose fault 9/11 was. The most obvious answer to that is that it was the fault of the 19 hijackers, and I would not mind at all if both Bill Clinton and George Bush would say that repeatedly. I believe Bill Clinton did very little about the terrorist attacks on Americans which occurred during his administration, but that doesn’t make him a terrorist, and it doesn’t make terrorism his fault, though it may mean Hillary isn’t the best person for the presidency. But it is also true that conservatives, who seem to idolize Ronald Reagan, conveniently forget that we lost 240 marines in Beirut, and President Reagan was not prepared for that.

Since Sunday, there has been a lot of high-sounding talk about the Clinton legacy, which some say Bill Clinton wants to protect. But I have a very different view of what motivated his recent outburst. When Bill Clinton doesn’t see or hear his name for a couple of days, he feels lonely, isolated and depressed, and he craves the attention he had while he was president. He becomes concerned that his fifteen minutes of fame may be coming to an end, and he can’t let that happen. Bill Clinton is at the center of Bill Clinton’s world, and he can’t understand why he isn’t at the center of yours and mine. Bill Clinton is to politics what Terrell Owens is to professional football. Even when he’s not playing football, Owens just can’t be happy unless the entire sports page and every sports talk show is about him. In the entire history of the United States, only two presidents have had egos too large to prevent them to drifting into a quiet retirement, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. My view is that their unwillingness to retire is directly proportional to their ineffectiveness in office. But they’re both guilty of bad manners, in any case.

I have a brother who, when he was a child, would periodically ingest an entire bottle of aspirin, not to commit suicide, but to bask in the attention, concern and panic of the adults around his circumstances. There was something fulfilling about being the child who needed to be rushed to the hospital. My brother grew out of it, but Bill Clinton never has, and he probably never will.

It has never been his politics which has bothered me, but his self-absorbtion, the self-absorbtion of a small child in a very small world. 9/11 was a terrible human tragedy for the 3,000 victims, their families, their friends, and to some extent, to the rest of us. Former President Clinton never talks about their pain, never has felt their pain and never visited the World Trade Center after it was attacked in 1993. But he has plenty to say about his legacy, or his interpretation of it, because it’s his. His view is that he matters, but the rest of us only matter when and if we help him matter.

Liberals call him the first black president, the first gay president, etc., and he now wants to be the first first lady who isn’t one. If Hillary wins the presidency, he is going to want her to let him run the country, but she’s probably too ambitious to let him do it, and the White House will be filled with a lot of testy finger-wagging battles. It might not matter that the Clintons are a fairly non-traditional first family, except that they may be competing with each other to be the head of the household, and the U.S.A. will be their household.

Contrary to what he says, he doesn’t feel your pain. Bill Clinton is a bright guy. He understands how other people feel, but understanding is not an emotion. It’s not his politics which bother me, it’s that he was America’s first tin man president–the one without a heart, and it’s such a long way back to Ar-kansas. Perhaps he had an unhappy childhood, perhaps he has done one too many bimbos, perhaps there are other reasons for it I haven’t even imagined. Whatever the reason may be, he is simultaneously one of the most gifted and heartless people I can recall. Blaming his problems on a vast right-wing conspiracy is his version of Hitler blaming his problems on the Jews.

THE WEAK THAT WERE IN THE WEEK THAT WAS

About a week ago, I read a news story which indicated that the parents of a teenage girl in New Hampshire were so desperate for her to have an abortion that they actually tied up their own daughter, put her in a car and attempted to transport her across state lines to an out-of-state abortion clinic. I don’t know why they didn’t think they could intimidate her into a New Hampshire abortion.

Then on Saturday came the sad news from East St. Louis, Illinois that a woman had cut open another pregnant woman’s stomach in an effort apparently to recover her unborn child and claim it as her own. To make matters worse, the woman also apparently murdered the woman’s other three children and left their decomposing bodies in a washer and a dryer.

Then yesterday I came across a story from Columbus, Georgia in which a teenager’s mother, along with two cousins, attempted to induce an abortion by forcing a pregnant teenager to drink turpentine on two separate occasions.

These are the sorts of horrors the National Organization for Women warn us will become commonplace if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned. Yet I can’t recall a single story like this prior to January 22, 1973, when abortion on demand became legal throughout the United States, when babies became commodities to destroy, discard or steal. It has only been since Roe that we have heard constantly about girls leaving their newborn babies on bathroom floors at the high school prom. It has only been since the Roe decision that states have felt forced to pass laws allowing mothers to abandon their newborns at churches, fire stations, etc. without any questions asked. I don’t know whether society can recover its pre-abortion conscience toward babies, but it seems incredibly obvious to me that the last 33 years have been a disaster.

We need to come up with a real plan B, not the morning after pill which, without a prescription, gives potentially pregnant women 40 times the dose they can get with a prescription for the traditional pill. Our desperation to “fix our mistakes” and have sex without consequences keeps killing, and killing and killing.

Two other recent news items have reminded me of the increasing decadence around us. One involved a mother who has been giving a marijuana-filled pipe to her 18-month-old child, and the other was about a 14-year-old Minneapolis boy who has been arrested for giving a couple of mouthfuls of alcohol to his three-year-old sister. Apparently, no adults were at home. The girl was found unconscious, and it doesn’t take very much alcohol to kill a small child. Marijuana can’t be good for small children either. I have seen what drug abuse and alcoholism during pregnancy does to children, and it’s not pretty, it’s difficult for the most patient adults to deal with, and it’s very expensive with regard to the necessary medical care. Someday the meek will inherit the earth. But in the meantime, the godless secular west isn’t much better than the cruel Islamic Middle East.

THOSE HELL-RAISING SUVs

On Tuesday, August 29, in the San Francisco area, a man driving a sport utility vehicle, specifically a Honda pilot, used his vehicle as a weapon in an attempt to kill and injure as many people as possible. Reports I’ve seen indicate he hit people deliberately at a dozen locations.

The first AP story I read about it mentioned the SUV five times and did not even speculate about the name of the driver until the ninth paragraph. The driver, as it turns out, had just returned from Afghanistan, and he is another devotee of the religion of peace, the religion which constantly excuses and even lavishes praise and martyrdom on its adherents when they commit murder. But I only found that out by reading other accounts of the story, AP wasn’t interested in telling enough of the truth to offend anyone in the Islamic community.

Secondly, it turns out that this man was taking medication for psychological problems, depression, mood swings, etc. Note that he was not off his meds, he was on them. It just so happens that I attend a church, one of whose members was on medication for a bipolar disorder, until about three weeks ago when he took two bottles of Tylenol, which caused his liver and kidneys to stop functioning, and he is now dead. Note that he was not off his meds, he was on them.

My point is that the AP passed up two potentially compelling stories so that they could push their anti-SUV agenda. Obviously I don’t mind that mention was made that the man was driving an SUV, but whatever happened to the concept of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Failing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is blatantly dishonest, it is deception, and much of what passes for journalism these days is dispensed by deceivers and liars.

I remember August 1, 1966, when a man named Charles Whitman climbed the tower at the University of Texas in Austin and murdered fifteen people, until he himself was shot dead. I can’t even recall what weapons he used. If that same thing happened today, the story would be about what he drove to the tower, particularly if his name, instead of Charles Whitman, was something like Omeed Aziz Popal.

By the way, what AP has against SUVs isn’t just about gas consumption. Most people who own SUVs, myself included, have them because they are very efficient at transporting numerous children to recreational activities. If one is willing to pay for the gas, they are ideal for taking children on out-of-state vacations, and they reduce the number of fights in the back seat. They have not become popular because of greed, but because of everyday practicality. The AP is apparently on an anti-family kick, the one which postulates that both men and children are unnecessary. Oddly enough, that is the same theory Omeed Aziz Popal and his medications came up with.

THE HATEFUL UNGRATEFULS

Last week one of my co-workers reminded me that when someone types the word failure in a Google search box and selects the “I’m feeling lucky” button, the “lucky” entry which appears is the White House’s biography of President George W. Bush. Maybe this proves that liberals are lazy, because a more creative person could have linked failure to any of the far less flattering things which have been said and written about the president. In any event, this is hardly news, in that George Bush has been Google’s top failure for at least two years. But stories about it have been making the rounds again for the past week or so.

So I’ve been thinking about failure and how it should be defined with regard to the current administration. Since we’re on the verge of football season and President Bush is from Texas, where football is an organized religion, I think a football analogy is appropriate. When a quarterback attempts a forward pass, a completed pass is usually a successful play. An incomplete pass, an interception, a fumble, a sack, a penalty on an offensive player, or even a completed pass which loses yardage is a failure. Obviously the opposing team has the opposite feeling about what failure is on a given play.

Since September 11, 2001, President Bush has been quarterbacking America’s effort to prevent future terrorist attacks. The president has chosen to do this by taking the ball into the enemy’s territory, specifically into Afghanistan and Iraq. The president has a vision of a free and democratic Middle East. One may argue about whether that is a realistic goal, especially with a small all-voluntary military force, which realistically can only hope for the support of half of the American public. Perhaps a democratic Middle East would just legitimize Hamas and Hezbollah. But democracy implies dissent, and dissent is badly needed in the Middle East, where public disagreement with radicals and terrorists would be a good thing.

In any case, the administration’s primary objective has been to prevent further major terrorist attacks within the United States. It has been nearly five years since 9/11, and there hasn’t been an organized terrorist attack in the United States since then. I don’t know how long our luck will hold up, since we essentially have no borders. But the fact is that if someone had told me on September 11, 2001, that we would get through at least the end of August in 2006 without anything similar happening, I would have assumed the president would have become fairly popular and that most Americans would be quite grateful for the administration’s efforts. I know I am. Though I may disagree with the administration about illegal immigration, uncontrolled spending, warrantless wire taps, the morning after pill and other issues, I am convinced that a day is coming when this window of time will be remembered as the good old days.

While the loss of American lives overseas is regretable, it took Iraq’s insurgents about three years to kill as many Americans as the Japanese killed on one December morning at Pearl Harbor. Osama Bin Laden, and others in the Middle East, have plans to kill more Americans in one day than have been killed in all of our nation’s previous wars. It would not surprise me much if they are eventually successful. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that the hateful ungratefuls will be easily killed. I hope some of them survive, at least long enough to realize what fools they’ve been and how useful they have been to their own enemies.

Imagine a group of soccer moms who cheer for and praise the accomplishments of everyone on the soccer field, except that they boo and hiss at their own children, eager to point out both real and imagined failures in their efforts. Then imagine a group of people who persistently and falsely call the president a drunken draft dodger and dream of his assassination, yet they continue to believe the obviously disprovable notion that Islam is a religion of peace. While the left continues to ally itself with them, Islamic extremists continue to scream for their blood.

None of this is meant to imply that any American should rubber-stamp everything the Bush administration does, but there is a clear difference between loyal and disloyal opposition. If I had been in the oval office since January 2001, I would have focused primarily on becoming less dependent on foreign oil and our vulnerabilities at home, especially on regaining control of our borders, our ports, our highways, our schools, shopping centers, apartment complexes, etc. Yet when the administration take on the difficult task of trying to reshape the Middle East, I can only hope and pray for the president’s success. Even when things seem to be going badly in Iraq, the president is not at the top of my failure list. Would it not make more sense to blame the disappointments of these years on 19 hijackers and those around the world who sympathize with them than to find fault with George W. Bush? If some must die, why not them instead of us? I’m sorry Casey Sheehan is dead, but I’m also sorry I know who his mother is. In everything they stand for, the left is suicidal. They’ll cut their own throats and pick their own eyes out in an effort to get even with President Bush for the unimaginable sin of failing to be cowardly.

Last week the Presbyterian Church USA published a book by two “theologians” who claim that President Bush destroyed the World Trade Center so he would have an excuse to build a new American empire. They also claim that the United States is responsible for killing 180 million innocent human beings every decade, partly by military action and partly by poverty and disease. Apparently we should feed, clothe and care for the sick and malnourished of the entire world, and blame ourselves if we don’t.

I have two questions for the jerks who wrote this book. First of all, if it’s reasonable to assume George Bush destroyed the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon too, why did Bill Clinton attack the World Trade Center? What was he trying to do, and how did both Presidents Bush and Clinton get Moslems help them to achieve their objectives?

Here’s my second question. Though I am not advocating violence, if we Americans are already killing eighteen million people every year, eighteen million and two wouldn’t hurt my conscience that much. The fact that these two nut cases are still living and breathing proves that they’re full of it. This book is typical of everything I hear from the left. Wish something were true, then announce it as fact. OK, two can play this game. Did you know that Ted Kennedy ate his dog last night for dinner, he ate it raw and he didn’t even bother to take the fur off. How disgusting! That’s what I’ve wished for all day, and now I proclaim it as fact. Please call CNN and pass it on. The world needs to know.

Of course, that’s pure fantasy, but fantasy is all the rage these days. It helps the “little people” in Hollywood.

GIVE US THIS DAY A GOOD CONFRONTATION

I have a friend whose husband recently went to the annual biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota as part of a Christian motorcycle club. By choice or by chance, I’m not sure which, he met Sonny Barger, the leader of the Hell’s Angels.

I don’t have a problem with motorcycles or their riders, and I suspect that Jesus might be more comfortable spending summers in Sturgis than spending Sunday mornings in many churches. But I suspect Jesus would speak to any Hell’s Angels he encountered about repentance. One thing I think he would not do is to ask Sonny Barger for his autograph and have his picture taken with him. Unfortunately, though, that is what my friend’s husband did.

Some Christians display an astonishing lack of moral clarity. I don’t know precisely what the secretive Hell’s Angels have been up to through the years, but I do know that a couple of years ago four people were killed in Laughlin, Nevada, when a fight broke out between the Hell’s Angels and the rival Bandito motorcycle gang. I know that at least one person was killed when the Hell’s Angels were asked to provide security for the Altamont music festival in 1969.
I know Sonny Barger has spent more than a decade in prison (thought I can’t recall what he was convicted of). It is generally believed the Hell’s Angels are heavily involved in drug trafficking, prostitution, and other things which keep vice squads in business.

We’ve all heard the old nursery rhyme, “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.” Lizzie Borden was acquitted, and it was actually her stepmother and father who were hacked to pieces, but that’s not relevant to my point here. Let’s assume for the moment that she did commit the crime. Imagine seeing Lizzie Borden chopping up her father and stepmother. Would it be appropriate to get her autograph and have one’s picture taken with her? Is that what Jesus would do? During her lifetime, Lizzie Borden was shunned by her generation, because they did not believe she was innocent. But today, the home where the murders occurred has been turned into a bed and breakfast, as if it would be wonderful to be there. We keep confusing fame with virtue. I’m tired of writing about the over-glorification of the rich and undeservedly famous.

Just for contrast, consider a story about Jesus from Luke chapter 11. Jesus was invited to dinner at the home of a pharisee, and he went. Luke says the pharisee was astonished that Jesus did not wash his hands before dinner. Jesus responded, not by meekly washing his hands and pretending to be embarrassed by his oversight, but by telling the pharisee and his guests that they were overly concerned about external things, but inwardly they were full of greed and wickedness. What is striking about this passage is not just what Jesus said about internal matters of the heart being more important than external customs, but the setting in which this took place. Jesus confronted this man when he himself was a guest in the man’s house. God’s mercy is great (especially if Peter is ushering people through the pearly gates), but no one will ever meet the soft and squishy, melted ice cream sort of Jesus who wants Sonny Barger’s autograph because he’s famous. Loving sinners without hating sin is useless. Hating sin without loving sinners is useless too, but we’re not having real problems with that.

WHERE THE LEFT WANTS TO LEAD US

Conservatives are conservative for various reasons. Some want to preserve traditional morality, some are nationalists, some are fiscal conservatives, some just want the government out of their business, etc. So I don’t want to make the assumption that liberals are all liberal for the same reason.

However, although John Kerry could vote for the war before he voted against it, he would never vote for parental notification for minors obtaining abortion before voting against it, and he would never vote against partial birth abortion before voting for it. To do so would be to desert the left’s most deeply held desire, the desire for abortion on demand.

In more general terms, what the left wants is to bypass the Creator’s natural order in which sexual activity may be either rewarding or risky, in favor of a newly devised order in which sexual activity brings only the consequences chosen by the participants, particularly the female participants. Apart from risk, sex becomes recreational, just as Hugh Hefner has always wanted. If sex carries no consequences, it also becomes essentially a consumer product with little hope of long-term emotional rewards either. If we can make the risks go away, the rewards will go away too. Anyone who doesn’t believe this should just note how many more relationships people are going through.

Yesterday morning I read an Associated Press story about a “masturbate-a-thon” which is being held in London. I didn’t search for this story, it was one of the headlines. By the way, the British got this idea from Americans, specifically from a similar event which has been held in San Francisco for six years. This is supposed to be a charitable event where participants masturbate publicly in front of strangers in one of four rooms, a men’s-only room, a women’s only room, or one of two co-ed rooms. I’m not sure where those who can’t identify their gender are supposed to go. Participants are not supposed to touch each other, though I suspect that inconvenient restriction will soon be done away with. The event is supposed to be for charity, and participants are supposed to ask their friends and neighbors to pledge money based on how long they masturbate or how many times a participant finishes (no faking orgasms, please). This charity is supposed to raise money for “HIV awareness and women’s health initiatives”, which is probably a euphemism for abortion, not breast cancer research. Try to imagine going from door to door asking your neighbors, “How long do you think I can masturbate, and how much are you willing to pay me to do it?” This is what the left wishes for. This is what they think is normal. It’s revulsive to write about, but it has to be written about, because it’s precisely this sort of sexual “freedom” which the left is more deeply committed to than anything else. I understand that not every liberal thinks this is good, but I also understand that many on the left have no moral restraints, and the people they vote for certainly have no moral restraints. That gets me to the polls every other November.

No matter how badly the war is going, though there’s no end is sight and I’m tired of it, I will continue to vote Republican. I know Cindy Sheehan would say, “Make love, not war. This isn’t as obscene as President Bush’s war in Iraq.” But people die at abortion clinics every day, though liberals don’t like to think of the unborn as people. Besides, I’m not really convinced that one of our soldiers who kills someone with a roadside bomb is less human or less virtuous than someone who raises money by masturbating publicly. VOTE REPUBLICAN, PLEASE!

WHAT I’VE LEARNED FROM PROFESSOR MIKE ADAMS

Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I know about him because he writes columns which appear on Townhall.com’s web site. Townhall probably has 100 columnists, give or take a few, and I don’t have time to read very many of their columns, but I usually read the columns Dr. Adams writes. The reason I read his columns is because his titles always catch my attention and make me curious what he’s writing about. For example:

“Buck Naked at Bucknell”
“The Old Rugged Cross-Dresser”
“It Ain’t Over Until the Fat Lesbian Sings”
“Of Mice and Minutemen”
“Sexual Her-assment at Appalachian State”

Despite the sleezy nature of some of these titles, Mike Adams is actually quite conservative, and his columns, like mine, defend traditional values and conservative principles. However, I confess that his titles are better than mine, and I promise to try to improve in the future.

Other than trying to come up with a catchy title, though, my preference is to keep rhetorical statements to a minimum. Earlier this week I read that DNC Chairman Howard Dean compared Florida senatorial candidate Katherine Harris to Joseph Stalin. If this comparison were appropriate, I would expect to be able to think of someone or some group of people Katherine Harris has had murdered, but there are no such people. Perhaps if Katherine Harris is looking for a potential first victim, she might want to consider Howard Dean. I wouldn’t miss him. Please bear in mind that I personally have no intention of harming Howard Dean or anyone else. I don’t think it’s a crime for me to recommend that she slaughter him if she decides to live like Joseph Stalin, as long as I specifically say it’s no wish of mine.

This week I also heard a local conservative talk show host criticizing the Arizona Republic, a newspaper which deserves quite a lot of criticism. He said, “Writing for the Republic is sort of like peeing in a swimming pool.” I agree with him that the Arizona Republic is pretty awful. But if someone reads my blog and says, “Your writing is like peeing in a swimming pool.”, I’m not going to learn anything from their criticism, even if their criticism is valid. So I like cute and clever titles, but I’m tired of rhetorical excesses.

DISNEY TRAINS KILLERS

I arrived home yesterday and discovered that for the first time in his life, my nine-year-old son wants to write a book. It’s normally difficult to get him to write a sentence, so I encouraged my young author to work on his literary masterpiece on the computer, because I also want him to learn to type well, and he needs the practice. Normally he’ll use a mouse, but he doesn’t like to do much with a keyboard. So this sounded like a great idea, and I wanted to keep him interested in it as long as possible. I knew my window of opportunity would be small, because nine-year-olds adopt new purposes, new lifestyles, hobbies and missions on a daily basis.

So since books are written one page at a time, he offered to show me his first completed page when he finished it. At first he told me his book would be about his life, then he said that it would actually be a combination of his life and something he saw on TV, a work of fiction. I was surprised how quickly he created his first page. At this rate, his book might be done by Labor Day.

But I was a bit disappointed with the content of his fiction when I read it. He used his name as his central character. He said some kids at school are “brainiacs”, the TV term for honor students, some kids are athletes, some kids are popular kids and some kids are unpopular kids. He said he wasn’t smart enough to be a brainiac, he wasn’t really popular, and even though he had played basketball and soccer, he hadn’t excelled at them and he was very unpopular. Then he said, “But beware of my powers, because I can zap you into prison with the snap of my fingers.”

This doesn’t sound like my son. So I began asking questions, and this is what I found out. The content of his book is derived largely, if not exclusively, from a recent Disney channel movie called “Read it and Weep.” I have not seen the movie, so I can’t comment on it directly. But from what I understand, the movie is about a girl who accidentally sends her journal to her teacher, and her teacher helps her get it published. The contents of her journal are apparently about an unpopular girl who plans to get even with her peers.

The problem with this is that as I told my wife, “This doesn’t sound like something our son would write. It actually sounds like something Eric Harris or Dylan Kleibold might have written when they were nine years old.” It has all of the same themes one would associate with Harris and Kleibold, who massacred several of their fellow students at Columbine High School in 1999. They believed they were unpopular, they divided their classmates into a series of cliques which they did not belong to, and they wrote about getting even with their classmates. As we all know, they eventually acted out this dark vision.

My wife and I had a long talk with our son, explaining to him that he cares about other kids, and he is very well-liked by most of them. But there are times during our school years when all of us feel unpopular. The appropriate thing to do about being or feeling unpopular is to look for someone to be nice to, someone to treat as we ourselves want to be treated, which certainly is not without mercy. The end result of our conversation was that our son tore up his manuscript and promised to write a more appropriate journal when school begins.

I would much prefer that we had no TV. But parents who still have a TV, for whatever reason, had better get used to the idea of monitoring what their kids watch and talking with them constantly about it. Disney isn’t about kids who love fluffy little animals anymore. The Disney corporation is deliberately training the next Columbine killers, though there can be absolutely no justification for doing so. One of the features of today’s children’s entertainment is that it specifically creates in children a desire for some special powers (witchcraft) which will help them resolve their problems and achieve their goals. I expect to win the battle for the hearts and minds of my children, but it’s a long hard struggle, and I’m concerned that many parents may be less involved with their children and less determined to win.

SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH

Whenever anyone is called upon to testify in a court case in the United States, they are obligated to take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Common sense should convince any of us that selecting portions of the truth which we like and omitting other portions of the truth which we don’t like would allow any witness to distort the facts of a case beyond recognition. The only path toward justice is for everyone with knowledge to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

It is unfortunate that journalists do not take the same oath as journalists which they would be required to take if they were testifying in court. If they were interested in the whole truth, perhaps they would be eager to remind us that Israelis are dropping leaflets warning civilians in Lebanon to leave combat areas, and perhaps they would contrast that with some discussion of the types of rockets Hezbollah is firing indiscriminately toward Israeli civilians, rockets designed not only with high explosives, but also with thousands of ball bearings which are meant to mame and dismember as many bystanders as possible. It would be nice to be reminded routinely that a Israel, a civilized nation, doesn’t want to kill as many Moslems as possible, but only those who take up arms against Israelis. For Israel’s enemies, however, any murdered Jew is a victory.

I am not Jewish, and I have no interest in Judaism as a religion. But it is outrageous that we are not told these things every hour. We are told constantly that civilians are dying in Lebanon (true enough, but Israel does try to limit those casualties), and we are almost never told that Israeli civilians are being targeted and killed deliberately. We are certainly not being told about the barbaric nature of their enemies. We are told endlessly how many Lebanese have been displaced by this conflict, but we are never told how many Israelis have been displaced, how many can’t return to their homes or how many cannot work for a living because the businesses which support their livelyhoods are closed. This morning President Bush ordered the U.S. navy to provide food, blankets and medicine to the people of Lebanon. By contrast, no one ever gives the Israelis anything, and no one ever notices the omission. It would be fair to ask how many suicide bombings it would take or how many Israelis would have to die before any foreign government would give a single Israeli even a handkerchief to cry into. We Americans must change this, because no one else will. We are told constantly by the press that Israel’s response to Hezbollah is disproportionate. Hezbollah has sent 2,400 rockets into Israel in less than two weeks. How many rockets must Hezbollah fire to make Israel’s response proper and appropriate, 5,000, 10,000, 1,000,000? Israel was condemned by the world for its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, but we should surely understand what Iran, Syria and Hezbollah have been up to since they pulled out six years ago. But shamefully, there’s no discussion of that.

We hear on the hour that everyone wants peace except the Israelis, even though anyone who cares about the facts knows that today’s terrorist organizations were started only after Israel’s neighbors tried unsuccessfully to destroy Israel in four wars. Anyone who wants to know can find out that the Palestinians have been offered land and peace, but they turned it down because they don’t want a two-state solution. They want a one-state solution, their state, with Israel, which is smaller and more densely populated than New Jersey, obliterated off the map. The reason the Palestinians don’t have a homeland is because they don’t want one in Palestine if there are any Jews left. Anyone who wants to know can find out that Arabs live in Israel, particularly in Haifa, which is being attacked indiscriminately by Hezbollah. I don’t know how well Arabs are treated in Israel, but it must be better than Jews and other non-Moslems fare throughout the rest of the Middle East. Israel is told constantly to give up land in return for peace. They gave the Sinai back to Egypt and forced their own citizens out of Jewish settlements on the west bank, but there is no sign of peace for them, just the dull thud of hundreds of rockets on their cities.

I stopped watching the evening news about 20 years ago when I first heard Peter Jennings refer to Israelis as terrorists. No American has ever been killed by a Jewish terrorist, but Arab terrorists have been killing Americans ever since one of them murdered Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968. Peter Jennings knew that, but he had his own pro-Arab agenda, and it discredited everything he said. I’d rather listen to Tokyo Rose, if she were still broadcasting, than to listen to most of the press in the United States. I actually did used to listen to Radio Moscow from time to time during the cold war years, and as bad as it was, it was more interesting and more honest than most of what passes for news on the major networks in the United States today.

Whether or not we should be in Iraq, we Americans have the same enemies the Israelis have, and we have a lot of enemies outside of the Middle East as well. Unfortunately, it may be just a matter of time before another major terrorist attack inside the United States reminds us of the nature of our enemies. In the meantime, remembering what happened on September 11, 2001, as unpleasant as it is, would be good for all of us.

PILING ON

William F. Buckley, the founder of the conservative National Review magazine, has joined virtually every Democrat in the country by calling for President Bush to resign from office.

Buckley has been quoted as saying, “If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign.” These comments apparently came in an interview with a correspondent from CBS, which leads to some obvious questions.

Is William Buckley on better speaking terms with CBS than he is with President Bush? The only reason CBS interviewed him in the first place was in the hope they could get him to chew on the president, which is their full-time job, and Buckley knows that, if his mind is still functioning normally.

Why has National Review joined the left, whose constant mantra can be summed up by WWED, “What would Europeans do?” I don’t want to be led by the nose by everything Europeans do, since European civilization is even further down the toilet than our own. If I wanted to be a European, I would move.

What does Buckley hope to accomplish by calling for the president’s resignation, with nearly two and a half years left in the president’s second term? Is Dick Cheney, or anyone else in the line of succession, a better alternative?

He says he’s frustrated with the continuing war in Iraq and with the president’s lack of fiscal responsibility. I’m concerned about the war in Iraq too,
particularly in light of Iran developing being close to having nuclear weapons, and also because of the current war between Israel and Hezbollah. The federal deficits don’t make me happy either.

But a point needs to be made. We invaded Iraq in March 2003, and it has been three years and four months since then. In May of 1972, President Nixon had allowed the war in Vietnam to drag on for three years and four months, in addition to the Johnson years. We lost many more people in Vietnam than we’ve lost in Iraq, and there was no end in sight to the war, even when President Nixon won re-election by carrying 49 states in November 1972. The Nixon administration always ran deficits, and President Nixon gave us affirmative action and the EPA, among other things which aren’t universally loved by conservatives. Why didn’t William Buckley call for President Nixon to resign? It couldn’t be because we were complicit with the rest of the world in forcing Taiwan out of the U.N. Richard Nixon did a lot of things which were anathema to the William F. Buckleys of the world, but I don’t think Buckley called for his resignation, even after the Watergate scandal blew wide open.

The truth is that William F. Buckley hopes that three or four liberals, and some frustrated conservatives will continue to read his magazine. Every magazine in the country, including National Review, is rapidly becoming a museum piece, which someday will be shown in galleries, but read by no one. The world isn’t coming to an end because of anything, right or wrong, the Bush administration has done so far, but I think William Buckley’s world is coming to an end. Perhaps William Buckley has contracted the disease which killed Barry Goldwater, the disease of suddenly wanting to be hip before he dies. I have some disagreements with the president, but I just don’t see who, besides CBS, is helped by this sort of piling on, and I’m not eager to do CBS any favors.

THE FINAL SOLUTION

As we all know, Adolph Hitler had a final solution for the “Jewish problem”. Now, as war flares anew in the Middle East, the world seems unwilling to allow the Jews to have a tiny spec of a homeland in the midst of Islamic nations who outnumber the Jews in the Middle East by at least a hundred to one. Even Israle itself has a large Arab population. Except for the lonely voice of George Bush, all world leaders agree that Israel is over-reacting to terrorism, kidnappings and rockets fired onto their tiny territory. Hitler has so many new friends today.

I have my own final solution for the “Jewish problem”, but it’s not like Hitler’s at all. It’s not really my solution at all, it’s just the one I favor. I decided to write about it after listening to a few minutes of Dennis Prager’s broadcast on Friday. For the uninitiated, Dennis Prager is a conservative, who is Jewish, not just culturally or by descent, but by religion. On Friday he said his belief in God comforts him and helps him keep his sanity during times like these, but he also said he doesn’t expect God to intervene.

I was quite struck by the latter part of that statement, the part about God being silent and uninvolved in our affairs, so I would like to address the rest of this column to Dennis and to everyone who believes that God is silent and has stopped speaking to men today. For Dennis specifically, my question is, “Do you really believe that God parted the Red Sea for your forefathers, yet somehow that same God does not care passionately about you?” Isn’t it more likely that the God of Abraham’s generation is also the God of this generation? If God was so concerned about the Jews of Esther’s generation that he arranged to have her become queen of Persia before Haman rose to power, shouldn’t we believe he’s equally concerned about the Jews of today, both Israelis and non-Israelis? Yes, God allowed the holocaust to happen, and millions of Jews and Gentiles died fighting the Nazis and their allies. Yet we all know that Israel came into existence, after not being a nation for two thousand years, three years after Hitler’s death. It’s true that God doesn’t always respond at the time we wish or in the way we wish, and it’s even true that God may be silent for some period of time. But if God is, I believe his voice will be heard and his character seen at some point in time.

So what may be the reason for God’s apparent silence? I can think of at least two possibilities. I’m a blogger, and I don’t have anything new to say every day. There may be times when God doesn’t have anything new to say. On the other hand, when I ask my kids to clean up their rooms and they don’t do it, I don’t have anything else to say to them until they clean up their rooms. This latter kind of silence is more common in my house than the former kind. After repeating and repeating and repeating the “clean up your room” message, I have to stop talking and act.

We all battle silent periods from God. It’s not just a Jewish problem, I’m a Christian, and it’s my problem too. Unless God has run out of things to say, which is unlikely in my case since I’m a slow learner, I can only ask, “What did you ask me to do last, which I haven’t done?” “What do I need to do so I can hear your voice again, and hear it more often?” That is precisely the question I have to take to church this morning.

Before I became a Christian in 1973, when I spoke to Christians about their faith, one of the things which struck me most about them was their conviction that God was involved in the most minute details of their lives, such as how they would do on final exams, even whether they could find a parking place or not. I could go to any of thousands of Christian churches today where people believe that God is working in a personal way in individual lives today, and they believe the Red Sea parted, and Jesus walked on water too. As I said, Christians experience God’s silence too, but no real Christian actually believes in a silent God.

What Dennis Prager said about God being silent, uninvolved, not intervening and sitting on the sidelines is probably typical of how Jews, whether they are religious or not, have felt for the past two thousand years. They’ve had it pretty tough, sometimes, unfortunately, because of men who professed to be Christians, but more often because of the malignant cancer of anti-Semitism which has plagued most of mankind for thousands of years, a cancer which is Satanic in origin, a cancer which destroys both Jews and their adversaries. I can’t help wondering how much better off Israel’s enemies would be if they just gave it up and spent their emotional energy and their other resources trying to make life better for themselves, regardless of the existence of a Jewish state.

Though Jews were persecuted long before the time of Christ, they certainly never went for two thousand years without a visit from God, which begs the question, “What did God tell them last, which they have ignored?” Perhaps it’s time to reconsider what a Jew (whose Hebrew name was Saul) said in Acts 17:30-31:

30 “In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31For he has set a day when he will judge the
world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”

The tomb is empty, no one has found the body, and perhaps Jews, who always wonder why God seems silent, should ask themselves what more they would want from a messiah than the one we Christians worship. I suspect Dennis Prager knows more about the New Testament than most Jews know, and he also knows Christians, Particularly American Christians, are the best friends Jews have in the world, but he needs to know Jesus. That’s my final solution, for Dennis Prager, for Jews generally, and for everyone.

FATHER KNOWS NOTHING

I have just returned from a week’s vacation in Colorado, staying at my mom’s and visiting friends and my original family. My older brother is in his mid-50s, and he has lived at my mom’s since 1994. He is currently working sporadically, and he spent most of the week doing yard work for my mom. True enough, the yard work needs to be done, and she can’t do it. But when I’m unemployed, underemployed or up to my neck in job dissatisfaction, I spend most of my time looking for a better and brighter future, and that doesn’t seem to be happening. Three years ago when I was there, my younger brother was also living with my mom, doing yardwork (with her blessing), and not looking very hard for a job. Meanwhile, my sister is working two jobs to support her family and her live-in boyfriend who works sporadically. In fairness, my brothers do not have children to support, and my sister has had three children, though only one is still at home. So necessity is part of the difference between them, but don’t my brothers have an obligation to themselves? My younger brother has moved out, and he has been working for the past year. Yet if the job and the girlfriend vanish, as they have in the past, I expect him to move back in with my mom and to take his time finding the next job.

As I said to my wife, I have been unemployed, but I have never been unemployed, not looking, not going to school and living with my mother. I did return home for a year in 1984, went to school so I could become a computer programmer, and I moved out as soon as I graduated and got a job. As my mom approaches 80, having someone around is helpful, but a man should work, search for work or go to school to be trained to work until he is able to retire or unable to work.

My purpose for writing this though is not to find fault with anyone, but to raise some basic questions which I suspect are not unique to my family at all. I have been wondering all week how my family became as matriarchal as it seems to me. How did our society get from a “Father Knows Best” culture in the 1950s to the father knows nothing and does very little culture of today? Certainly no fault divorce, rising divorce rates and absent fathers have had something to do with it, and feminists have simultaneously pushed for greater employment opportunities and a world where sex does not create unwanted pregnancies and implies no obligation to a man. I’ve been hearing for at least 35 years about the vanishing role of fatherhood and the new world order where men refuse to be men and women insist on being men. It doesn’t help that the entertainment media constantly portray men as bumbling fools, and I know there is really an underlying ideology behind everything. Yet much of the drift toward demasculinization seems unconscious and not at all deliberate. I don’t think anyone in my family ever consciously voted for these reversals of tradition.

Former Colorado football coach Bill McCartney tried to address this issue with his Promisekeepers organization, but I suspect with only limited success. Certainly it is helpful to society whenever a man chooses to be faithful to his wife and children and to provide for his own needs. Yet if change is possible, I think it has to come primarily from women. In the case of my brothers, I wonder why maternal love doesn’t push them out of the nest instead of encouraging them to stay in it for extended periods of time, as they have done. I believe most of what men do or don’t do is determined primarily by whatever their wives or girlfriends encourage or tolerate. My relatively liberated sister is exercising power directly, whereas more traditional women exercise power over men indirectly, yet their lives are easier and they have just as much food on the table and more control over how their children turn out. I doubt if my sister finds what she is doing liberating, even though she is living out the feminist dream of being relatively independent from a man. To a large extent, whoever makes the money makes the rules, but anyone who works outside the home knows it brings more slavery than freedom.

Whatever their role, women have enormous social power. Only a small minority of men are universally attractive to women, but men look at women and find many of them attractive throughout their lives. Even women watch other women all the time, observing their dress, jewelry, makeup and hairstyle, and women probably get as many compliments about their appearance from other women as they do from men. Conversely, women usually feel far more threatened by other women than by men. A society where men are expected to make the world a better place cannot exist unless it’s what women want and expect. If I had time to do the necessary research and write a book, I would probably be writing about masculinity, femininity, how gender roles are defined, how it affects family structures, the impact of religion or the lack of it on gender roles, and other family-related issues which shape society.

THINKING VERTICALLY

I have not seen Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, and I don’t even have a firm opinion about global warming. But I do have an inconvenient truth of my own which I would like to share with former divinity student Al Gore, or anyone else who will listen.

Whether or not global warming is a real problem and whether or not we are causing it, or to what extent man’s activity is contributing to it, is the subject of debate by people who are more meteorologically inclined than I am. But there is something about the global warming crowd which annoys me, even if everything they believe is true. The thing which bothers me, simply put, is that they are horizontal thinkers.

As I write this, forest fires are out of control in Arizona and Houston is flooded. Of course, it rains much more frequently in Houston than anywhere in Arizona anyway, but my observation for the last five or ten years is that many parts of the United States have either been suffering from drought and forest fires, or conversely from too much rain, flooding and hurricanes. It wasn’t so long ago that most Americans were farmers; my mother grew up on a farm, and so did my wife’s father. When we were a more agricultural people, if the rain didn’t come when we needed it, or if it rained during harvest time when it shouldn’t, many of our forefathers would pray and hold themselves personally accountable for their misdeeds to the God of the universe, regardless of their particular religious affiliation. If global warming is real and we humans are causing it, I would still rather pray than make a movie. I would rather appeal to a just God for a real solution than rely on a social movement among imperfect human beings to find an imperfect solution. Look around and ask which major problems mankind is dealing with well. Of course, Al Gore could not draw attention to himself or to his presidential aspirations by praying quietly. Instead of telling us the inconvenient truth, he prefers to sell it to us.

Some will criticize what I’m saying by claiming that religion turns people into fanatics, but the fact is that religion only turns selfish people into fanatics. Having endless sex day and night with an infinite number of virgins isn’t my idea of paradise. But if it were, I would still be unwilling to murder anyone to achieve that objective. The most destructive episodes of a form of religion out of control are always due to someone manipulating the faith they profess for personal gain, whether the manipulator is a terrorist or a TV evangelist. No one needs to enter a church or a synagogue to find selfishness. It’s everywhere, and people of faith don’t have any monopoly on it. I would argue, however, that they do have a virtual monopoly on unselfishness.

By suggesting people should think vertically, I am not saying people should ignore the needs or rights of others. Seven of the ten commandments have nothing directly to do with God. People who think vertically are much more inclined to care about others, as well as what pleases an impartial Creator, than people who are at the center of the only universe they will acknowledge.

It has been my observation that people whose world view is completely earth-oriented and man-centered become increasingly angry with their fellow human beings because of real or perceived injustices. After all, with God out of the picture, there is no one left but the other guy to fix the mess we’re in. When one’s neighbor fails to fix our mess, the natural human tendency, apart from God, is to become angry and make increasingly strident demands. People who think horizontally are always comparing themselves with others, imagining that others lives are easier, and anyone who compares himself with other people is likely to be angry or envious.

This morning I was listening to a newscast about a Juneteenth celebration, in which a black woman was describing with great anger the injustices to her ancestors. I’m not apologizing for slavery, though it is worth pointing out that anyone who works for someone else is a slave to some extent, and a man who works for himself takes risks that employees of others don’t have to be concerned about. As I listened to her, it occurred to me that she has never been a slave, since slavery ended at the end of the Civil War, and it’s at least possible that her ancestors were happier than she imagines, particularly if they were people who trusted God and saw much of what they were required to do as a service for others. Besides that, though she has taught herself to be angry about something she has never suffered, she has completely ignored the hundreds of thousands of white people who were willing to give their lives to set her ancestors free. I’d love to be able to tell her how Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president, sent the National Guard to Little Rock to make sure black kids could go to school. Unfortunately, her response would probably just be an angry “they owed that to us.” I ought to treat people well, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be grateful if I do. How can people fail to understand that they have more power and leverage with others if they express gratitude to whomever it is due, rather than spewing out a never-ending barrage of angry complaints, especially about the suffering of their ancestors which they’ve never experienced?

Everywhere I hear the sound of narcicism from the horizontal “everything’s about me and my people” crowd. A generation dreams of being the next American idol, not for the relatively noble purpose of making great and wonderful music, but for the wealth and fame itself. The very few people who do become famous or win a lottery have to spend much of their time protecting themselves, their families and everything they own from other people. I remember hearing once about somebody stalking Anne Murray’s mother, because making it or having contact with someone who has made it seems to have become more important than great virtue, knowledge or skill. When my life is over, I would rather have a handful of close friends say I had a significant and positive effect on their lives than to have a hundred million strangers know who I was.

People who understand that their lives have purpose within the larger purposes of God have the ability to suffer injustice and to look to God for help handling the situation, rather than lashing out at everyone around them. People who feel accountable to a God who is greater than they are are more likely to give aid and comfort to those around them, in order to serve both God and their fellow man. People who call on God can and should expect very effective help from someone who is not subject to human limitations, prejudices and vices. God doesn’t send anyone a monthly bill for his services either. I learned to pray when I was seven years old, when my drunken father was beating my mother. I never was angry with my father because I learned to look up instead of sideways. By the way, my father is dead and my mother celebrated her 79th birthday yesterday.

As for the weather, let’s suppose for a moment that there have been a lot of weather-related catastrophies in the United States recently, and let us further suppose that they are not because of anything we’re doing to the earth, but they are instead God’s response to how we treat each other and disregard him. Perhaps God means for the weather to get our attention, and he wishes for us to walk in repentance. Instead of just knocking on the door of someone who is willing to think vertically and listen, how hard will he have to bang on the door, kick the door in or destroy the house in order to get a horizontally thinking world to pay attention to him? We must think vertically because it’s virtually impossible for a horizontal thinker to repent or to be consistently accountable to others. The purpose of the ten commandments, and every commandment which followed, was to teach us to consider God and to think vertically about everyone around us, instead of being self-centered and focused only on what we can see, hear, taste, smell, touch and own.

SUPREMELY DISAPPOINTED IN THE COURT AGAIN

It has become an annual ritual. As we approach July 4, the Supreme Court of these United States rules in favor of one injustice after another, seemingly determined to get us to put our fireworks away. This year’s batch of shameful rulings has begun.

I understand why many people oppose capital punishment. Some don’t believe in executing criminals for any cause. Some are concerned about the finality of the judgment, so that if later evidence exonerates someone, capital punishment is irreversable. Some don’t like capital punishment because they feel it falls disproportionately upon minority groups and the mentally ill. I understand the objections, and I don’t want to argue these points here.

It does bother me, however, when the Supreme Court rules in favor of those on death row that they may pursue lawsuits claiming that the lethal injections used by states are cruel and unusual. Nearly every state in the country has adopted lethal injections as the preferred method of execution, because of the belief that it is more humane and painless than the electric chair, the gas chamber or hanging. We have already gone the extra mile to make capital punishment as humane as possible. With this ruling, it will become virtually impossible for any state to execute anyone, overturning the will of most Americans and most legislatures. That might be tolerable for some other reason, but it’s absurd to argue that society has no right to inflict pain on murderers, and that is the essence of this ruling.

If we do away with capital punishment, I want people who would otherwise be on death row either to be put to hard labor or to be put in solitary confinement so they never see another human being face to face again. I want murderers to suffer as much as their victims suffered, but their lawyers will prevent that. No matter how many Supreme Court justices are appointed by Republican presidents, we keep getting these pro-criminal, anti-victim rulings because our law schools are designed to produce lawyers and judges who care more about the accused than they do about victims of crime.

As of now, even without this ruling, most people who are sent to death row can look forward to twenty years of appeals before their sentence is executed. That’s enough time for many relatives of victims to die of natural causes. Whether or not capital punishment is a deterrent to crime may be debated. What can’t be debated is that a toothless judicial system is an open invitation to criminals who have no reason to fear society’s retribution for any crime.
Thanks to this ruling, the only rule I would follow if I were a criminal is never to shoot at the police and not to resist arrest.

Think back to the Oklahoma City bombing. Tim McVeigh was executed six years afterwords, which is quite speedy these days. That happened because he committed a federal crime. If he had blown up a private day care center, he would be a state prisoner in Oklahoma, and he would still be looking forward to another decade of appeals regarding his case, not to mention that the Supreme Court has just given him the right to claim that Oklahoma has no right to hurt him. Sadly, the reason Tim McVeigh is dead is because he blew up federal property. The 168 people he murdered are irrelevant collateral damage. If he had killed any or all of them without blowing up a federal building, he would have had an excellent chance of living out his normal lifespan. He would have been confined, but Oklahomans would be obligated to provide him with three hot meals a day and a place to sleep, at no expense to himself. Imagine how wonderful it would be not to have to worry about the mortgage, the electric bill, groceries or the price of gasoline. If it were not for the fear of God, crime would make sense for all of us, and the courts are trying to get God out of our lives too. Won’t a completely lawless society be wonderful? If not, why do we keep aiming for one? Now that Zacarias Moussaoui has been spared the death penalty, perhaps Tim McVeigh would even be able to blow up a federal building. Even if he was a disgusting creep, he may have just been ahead of his time.

101 FACTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

001. I weighed three pounds and a quarter of an ounce when I was born.

002. I graduated from college without personally reading a single textbook. My books were read to me, because they weren’t available in Braille.

003. If I could see, I would deliver your pizza within 30 minutes. As it is, you should expect a slight delay. There’s a reason why ESPN has a show called “Cold Pizza.”

004. I am the only member of my original family who doesn’t smoke.

005. My earliest memory is of Christmas morning in 1955. I got a record player which only played 78s.

006. My mother once customized a chess board for me by gluing bunyan pads onto the alternating spaces.

007. I have been on the ground in 25 of the 50 states, and I have lived in five of them.

008. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first disabled student who attended the Albuquerque public schools. I started first grade there back in 1959.

009. One winter day, when I was about seven years old, my father got our car stuck in the snow. About half a dozen college kids picked up our two-ton Chevy and moved it so we could drive away. I didn’t even have to get out.

010. After that, my father got stuck in the snow again, no college kids were around, and we had to call a tow truck.

011. I have a wife and two sons.

012. My oldest son is named after my first friend in first grade, but my friend doesn’t know about it because his family moved to California in 1961 and my son wasn’t born until 1996.

013. My second son is named after the best man at my wedding who, though he never smoked, died of lung cancer more than three years before my son was born.

014. On November 22, 1963, I was informed about President Kennedy’s assassination by a fellow fifth grader named Gary Roach. Needless to say, the assassination has always bugged me.

015. My second son was born one minute before midnight on St. Patrick’s day.

016. I grew up in Albuquerque. So it just logically follows that the Minnesota Twins have always been my favorite baseball team.

017. I left the Catholic church when I was twenty, but I never, never cheer against Notre Dame, and I never will unless they play the New Mexico Lobos.

018. My kids think my favorite color must be black, but I was born in a Texas panhandle town whose name means yellow in Spanish.

019. The first album I ever bought was called “More of the Monkees.”

020. My favorite pudding is tapioca.

021. The Monkees later did a song called “Tapioca Tundra”, which was the original name for this blog on Blogspot and Blogstream.

022. I once flew alone from Denver to Dallas for a friend’s wedding without knowing whether anyone would pick me up at the airport and without knowing where the wedding was. I knew when the wedding was scheduled, but I had lost my friend’s unlisted phone number. I got to the wedding, and everything went well.

023. Most of the women I liked when I was single got as far away from me as they could, so I didn’t date very much until the summer when I turned 37.

024. Two women I was dating that summer met each other when they almost simultaneously showed up at my apartment. It wasn’t supposed to happen. I married one of them.

025. No else in my original family attends church regularly. They’re welcome to join me, if we ever live in the same state again.

026. My wife has three brothers. They used to live on three different continents.

027. My heroes have always been jewelers, ever since a Zales jeweler brought me a Braille watch in second grade. The presentation was filmed and shown on the local TV news that night.

028. My wrists were so small that Zales had to give me their smallest girls’ watch. After the TV crews left, I put my arm down and the watch fell off my wrist and broke.

029. I cried when my watch broke. But Zales replaced the watch, and that’s why my heroes have always been jewelers.

030. The first 45 rpm record I ever bought was Bobby Goldsboro’s “Little Things.”

031. Only jewelers can see little things, and that’s also why my heroes have always been jewelers.

032. I have worked as a computer programmer for more than 20 years.

033. The reason Y2K was no big deal is because I fixed everything. I thought you would understand.

034. I missed seven weeks of school in seventh grade, and I wish I had missed more.

035. I worked for five years as a word processor from 1979 to 1984.

036. I got an F in typing in seventh grade because I missed seven weeks of school.

037. I loved school, but I hated seventh grade. You’ve probably figured that out.

038. One of my roommates in college was an engineering student. He told me, “Engineering is everything, everything has something to do with engineering.” I said, “Economics students think they’re studying everything, because everything has something to do with supply and demand, and biology students think they’re studying everything because biology is the study of life, and everything is about life.” He responded, “But engineering is everything, it really is.”

039. The main thing I learned in college is that engineering is everything.

040. I spent two weeks during the summer of 1962 at my maternal grandmother’s. She had a tornado cellar, and I spent two weeks wishing for a tornado.

041. She told us kids that if we didn’t go to sleep right away, she would scream like a panther. I thought she knew a special scream, because I took everything literally, and I spent two weeks trying to misbehave enough to get her to do that scream.

042. The only grandmother I ever got along with was the other one. She never screamed either, but she would have if she had promised to.

043. My paternal grandmother (the nice one) died of a heart attack in a doctor’s office. She was waiting to see the doctor about the chest pains she had been having.

044. My father was an alcoholic.

045. My good grandma was his mom, and the only grandfather I ever knew was his dad. I miss both of them.

046. My mother says that my father left town before the birth of each of their four children. She had to drive herself to the hospital when my sister was born.

047. My parents divorced when I was nine.

048. My wife says I have an opinion about everything. But I have no opinion about whether or not my socks match.

049. I have traveled to Michigan eight times, or nine if I count landing at the airport in Saginaw on the way to Toledo.

050. I have been to Ohio twice, not counting a stopover in Cincinnati on the way to Nashville.

051. The first music I ever liked as a boy was country music.

052. Probably no one ever influenced the kind of music I like more than the late Jim Reeves, who primarily sang ballads from 1957 until his death and helped me learn to like folk music too.

053. I have been to half a dozen Peter, Paul and Mary concerts. I kept going because I didn’t need ear plugs.

054. The best musician I’ve ever seen live is Phil Keaggy. He’s a terrific guitarist, but I only went twice because I needed ear plugs.

055. I would like to be buried near Sandia Crest (east of Albuquerque), but not today.

056. If I could choose any travel destination outside of the United States, I would go to Israel. If I were still single, I would take the risk.

057. If I could go anywhere within the United States where I haven’t been, I would either go to the Texas gulf coast (Galveston or Corpus Christi), Mobile, Alabama, or to Oregon, since I like Seattle, but I’ve been there and I haven’t been to Oregon.

058. My wife wants to go to New England and I’ve never been there, but that’s marriage for you.

059. We’re too poor to take vacations, so it doesn’t matter.

060. I have skied at Winter Park in Colorado, but I wasn’t very good at it. The skiing didn’t make me nearly as nervous as the chairlift.

061. I could count to a thousand when I was four years old.

062. I still remember what my phone number and address were in 1960.

063. It was 116 degrees on August 23, 1964, when we passed through Needles, California on the way to Disneyland, and our car heater was on because my five-year-old sister had tried to turn on the radio and accidentally turned on the heater instead.

064. My favorite birthday cake is German chocolate, my favorite ice cream is vanilla, my favorite pie is pumpkin, and cookies are the only thing oatmeal is good for.

065. My maternal grandfather’s first wife died during the 1918 flu epidemic. They had been married less than a year. My grandfather himself had a heart attack and died in 1947, before I was born.

066. My paternal grandfather got his first job working for a railroad at age 13. He eventually became a conductor, and he worked for the same railroad for 57 years, until he was forced to retire at age 70.

067. One of the worst places I’ve ever been is at White Sans, New Mexico during a sandstorm. It’s OK when the wind isn’t blowing.

068. My great great grandfather was an Indian chief.

069. I started my current job on the same day of the year when I was once laid off, Halloween.

070. Because of month-end production problems, I once had to work from 6:30 a.m. one morning until 3:30 p.m. the next day.

071. My favorite time of the year is summer, or winter in Phoenix.

072. My favorite musical instrument is the piano, and I wish I heard organs a lot more often too, especially pipe organs.

073. I like to go swimming, but I can’t swim.

074. Even though I’m no longer Catholic, I still eat fish on Friday whenever I can. The Catholic church officially discontinued the requirement in 1966.

075. There is absolutely no Mexican food which is too hot for me, but the hot mustard at Chinese restaurants virtually paralyzes me.

076. I still only weighed 88 pounds when I was fifteen and a half. My oldest son, who is almost ten, weighs 90 pounds.

077. I was 39 inches tall when I started first grade. My oldest son was 46 inches tall when he started first grade, and my younger son is at least 48 inches
tall now, and he won’t be in first grade for more than a year.

78. I have perfect pitch hearing. I can identify any musical note I hear.

079. There are two kinds of people in the world, Republicans and wannabes.

080. My favorite childhood disease was chicken pox. I thought it was mosquito bites, and I went to school with it for at least a week. My mother made me stay home with it one day when she saw me getting dressed, but it never made me feel sick.

081. My worst childhood disease was red measles. I was sick with it for a month.

082. I lived in Denver during the Christmas Eve blizzard of 1982, when 24 inches of snow fell in one day. The snow drifts in front of my house were up to my chest, and one of my friends couldn’t even see the top of her car.

083. I have a bachelor’s degree in economics which I have never used. I can hardly remember the difference between a monetarist and a Keynesian anymore.

084. My favorite carnival ride is the ferris wheel. Roller coasters make me nervous.

085. I like to write, and I enjoy public speaking.

086. I have been to Disneyland, Alkatraz, the Space Needle, the Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, White Sans, both the Silverton and Cumbres-Toltech railroads, Yellowstone Park, the mall of the Americas (yippee), both the New Mexico and Ohio state fairs, the governor’s mansion in Arkansas when Dale Bumpus was governor, Dollywood, the Epcot Center, underground Atlanta, Central Park, the Rockefeller Center, the Empire State building, the Henry Ford museum, Cedar Point (outside of Toledo), Six Flags over Texas and twice to the campus at Notre Dame.

087. Before I had kids, I could afford to travel, but I wouldn’t trade my boys for a hundred million miles on the road.

088. There was an awards ceremony at the end of the school year when I was in sixth grade. I got a pin for being the best student in my class in every academic subject. The only pin I didn’t get was the pin for courtesy. The guy who won the courtesy award flunked the sixth grade. What I learned in sixth grade was not to be too courteous.

089. College basketball is my favorite spectator sport. I also listen to football and baseball, but rarely to any other sport.

090. The poorest frozen pizza is better than a great wine.

091. I like classical music, but not all of it. The greatest composers are Mozart and Tchaikovsky.

092. One of the two greatest voices in the history of recorded music belonged to the late Karen Carpenter. The other one belongs to the underachieving, but vocally satisfying Jennifer Warnes.

093. When I bought the album “Close to You” in 1970, I took it home and listened to it eleven times.

094. But the greatest album ever made is called “Singer Sower” by the Second Chapter of Acts.

095. Enya is the only worthwhile new artist of the last twenty years.

096. My mother got a bachelor’s degree when she was eighteen. She was studying for a master’s degree in psychology at Texas Tech when I was little, but she didn’t finish because my father was transferred to Albuquerque.

097. Both of my brothers dropped out of high school.

098. I never get separated from my wife in public, because she is always laughing, and I can hear her across the room wherever we go. I like her sense of humor, and I like always knowing where she is.

099. I was almost 38 when I got married, almost 43 when my first son was born, and I was 47 when my other son was born. We are often addressed as grandparents. We have a big job in front of us.

100. My five-year-old can throw a paper airplane better than I can, a lot better.

101. Most importantly, the deepest and the most emotional experiences I have had are spiritual encounters with the three men Don McLean admired most, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

THE VAST RIGHT GOD CONSPIRACY

On his “Slow Train” album, Bob Dylan observed, “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’ve got to serve somebody.” Later, on his “O Mercy” album, he says, “We live in a political world.” I agree with both of these observations. But the merger of Christianity and politics isn’t just controversial among non-Christians, it is also controversial in Christian circles.

Many Christians are unwilling to speak up about any political issue, primarily because they believe the real issue is one’s faith or the lack of it, not anyone’s political beliefs. They don’t want to take political positions for fear of giving offense to someone who might otherwise be open to the gospel, and they correctly argue that it is quite possible for someone to be completely opposed to abortion, for instance, yet to be destined for eternal separation from God. They want to keep the business of the church separate from the business of politics, and they don’t want to lose their tax-exempt status.

Other Christians argue that it’s inappropriate to remain silent about political issues, especially when the direction of society is contrary to the teachings of scripture. They argue, for instance, that if abortion is immoral, failing to speak against it is offering implicit consent to the practice. Why should anyone’s conscience be muted when they leave the church? Many of them work hard, not only regarding specific issues, but to try to see that the most favorable candidates win election. Some Christians believe they have an obligation to exercise dominion on earth, and they use Old Testament passages about Israel occupying the promised land as their best guidance regarding what to do today. I do not believe Christians ought to seek to rule the earth during the present age, yet that doesn’t excuse Christians from involvement in the world’s affairs, where they are sometimes the only people who can speak the truth, seek peace, and show mercy when it is appropriate to do so.

In the Amplified Bible, Revelation 13:7 says regarding the beast:

7 “He was further permitted to wage war on God’s holy people (the saints) and to overcome them. And power was given him to extend his authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation.”

That means Christians cannot count on winning elections, the world is at war with both politically active Christians and politically inactive Christians, and all Christians should expect to face temporary defeat in their conflict with the world. Though political activity might, in some cases, be considered a hindrance to the spread of the gospel, and Christians need to be careful not to confuse political issues with spiritual needs, failing to be society’s conscience may also hinder the gospel, especially when the normal human tendency toward immorality is multiplied exponentially, as it is today, and as it will be for the foreseeable future.

My advice to Christians is to do what the church’s first martyr Stephen did, serve as a conscience to your own generation, gently tell the truth and keep telling it as long as this life continues, but do it as a witness, not expecting to win in the short term, and focus on the primary issue of men’s spiritual need to accept the risen Christ as Lord and Savior.

ANOTHER SLICE OF AMERICAN HUMBLE PIE

During a week when Abu Al-Zarqawi has been killed, I wish I could feel good about the course of things in the good old U.S.A. But here are a few of my random thoughts about the disappointments of this week.

I watched today’s Pentagon briefing with General Caldwell regarding the death of Al-Zarqawi, and the most noticeable thing was the media’s disappointment about his death, their concern about the manner of his death, how much pain he suffered, how his body has been treated, etc. The mainstream media and their leftist allies are more grieved about Al-Zarqawi’s departure from us than they were about the assassination of John Kennedy. Our own press is indistinguishable from Al-Jazeera.

I remember when baseball was our national passtime, before we became fond of self-loathing. But I don’t even dare mention baseball this week, because there’s now good reason to suspect that many or most of today’s major league players are using banned substances. The problem isn’t that there is no reliable test for human growth hormones or other steroids. The problem is that too many are willing to risk their health, sacrifice their integrity, and probably sell their souls for fame, money and the hidden advantages of cheating.

Then there’s the Ann Coulter controversy. Chairman Ann called four 9/11 widows witches and said they have enjoyed their celebrity status as widows and have used it for political purposes. I haven’t followed what these four women have said or done closely, and reasonable people may disagree with Ms. Coulter. I’m not necessarily endorsing what she said in this regard, but let’s face a couple of facts. First of all, this is a very minor point in her new book, and the media is using it as a diversion so they don’t have to discuss the reality and the substance of everything else she has to say. More importantly, where’s her right to free speech? The people who are complaining about what she said are so intellectually dishonest that they pretend to be apalled when she calls someone names, but they have never been able to speak about her without calling her names. If they would quit calling her “extremist” as if it were her middle name, perhaps they would retain the right to be displeased with her. If her critics were honest, they would acknowledge that she can sometimes be mildly unpleasant, but they are massively unpleasant to her. I hope a lot of people will buy her new book, because they’ll learn more from it than they’ll ever learn from the Marxist press.

This week the marriage protection amendment also failed in the senate. It seems to me that the real issue here is not who marries whom, but what environment children will be raised in. Gay marriage is just another step down the path of destroying the traditional family. I knew a Navajo boy when I was growing up who told me that his mother and his grandmother were the same person, that is, his father had impregnated his own mother, and he was the result. I don’t know if that story was true, or if he just said it for shock value. But a society which believes that all lifestyles are valid and should be honored by society will eventually come to the inevitable conclusion that it’s reasonable, even wonderful, for a man to impregnate his mother. The fact is that it is better for children to have one mother and one father than to have two mothers, two fathers, three mothers and two fathers, etc. But this sort of wisdom is disappearing in Sodomerica.

Finally, I read this week that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wants to remove seven Blackhawk helicopters from service in the Bahamas intercepting drug traffickers, so that he can use them in the war on terrorism. I’m in favor of doing what we can about terrorism in the world, but these helicopters have been very effective as a deterrent to the importation of cocaine, heroin and other drugs from the Bahamas. It really won’t matter if we win the war
on terrorism if we’re too stoned to notice.

I was told as a small child that the United States had never lost a war. I was born during the year we achieved a truce in Korea, and later we lost in Vietnam, gave up the war on poverty, got a truce out of the first Persian Gulf war, and who knows what we’ll eventually get out of the current one. We’re supposed to give up in the war on drugs. In fact, many people would like us to legalize and tax drug abuse, and probably prostitution as well. That would put the government in all of the businesses once run by the Mafia, since state lotteries are the government’s version of the numbers racket.

Legalizing the use of today’s controlled substances would be a disaster for at least three reasons. It would remove the last barrier to addiction. The repeal of prohibition didn’t make alcoholism go away. We all know that alcohol was available during prohibition, but afterwords, it was both available in more places and it was advertised. No one should kid themselves about the fact that legalizing drugs would create a situation where companies would spend millions of dollars marketing cocaine, heroin, marijuana and meth to all of us, and they wouldn’t spend that money in vain.

Secondly, the market for illegal drugs is not a fixed target. The marijuana people smoke now is many times more potent than the marijuana sold during the 1960s. If the government legalized meth, for instance, they would probably legalize a “relatively safe” form of it. Addicts, however, prefer the best high they can get. So when the black market came up with an even more potent and more dangerous form of meth, government meth would become obsolete, in favor of the newer deadlier version. The notion that legalizing drugs would reduce crime, eliminate gangs and end the black market is an illusion.

Someone may point out that alcohol is legal and it’s a fairly standard product, and they might argue that other drugs would be the same. But there is a significant difference between the consumption of alcohol and the consumption of other drugs. Breweries aren’t just marketing beer, wine and other alcoholic beverages to alcoholics, they are marketing them to a substantial portion of the population who may, for instance, have a glass of wine with someone socially. Many people who drink occasionally have no intention of getting drunk or even feeling a buzz from the experience. Though many of the people I’ve known have used marijuana, LSD, cocaine and meth socially, but they always did it with the goal of getting high. We all know that alcoholism destroys families, and it’s a contributing factor in many accidents and crimes, but the destructive nature of alcohol is minor compared with the destructive nature of other drugs.

Finally, in order to regulate “relatively safe” versions of formerly illegal drugs, the federal government would have to establish yet another massive bureaucracy which would attempt to regulate the precise chemical content of every addict’s drug of choice. That’s an expensive proposition, and it would fail.

The “legalize and tax it” crowd is wrong about drugs and wrong about prostitution. Winning the war on drugs isn’t an option, it’s a necessity. Maybe Donald Rumsfeld knows that, or maybe he doesn’t. But the point to me is that if we fight every battle 10,000 miles away while allowing the United States itself to deteriorate, we will be participating in our own destruction. Don’t any of our leaders remember the lesson of history, the one which says, “19 of the past 21 major civilizations collapsed from within.” I’m afraid people will soon be saying, “20 out of 22.”

SUMMER IS A BUMMER

As seasons go, summer was always my favorite, with hot days, pleasant warm nights, vacation from school, swimming, picnics, baseball, etc. The days of summer always seemed to blend into one long day of fun, and even the occasional sunburn didn’t seem too bad.

Summer was once a time to run through the sprinklers in West Texas, and I can still hear the sound of them and almost feel the cool splash of water, at least in my memory. There were birthday parties too, since my mother, my older brother and I all have summer birthdays. I can still remember the angel food cake on my brother’s eighth birthday. Angel food wasn’t my favorite flavor, but it was cake.

Then I gog used to the hot dry summers in New Mexico, which were eased by more rain than usual from mid-July through mid to late August, and also by the fact that we used to live in a house which faced west, which meant that the front yard was shady in the morning and the back yard was shady in the afternoon.

Then I got used to the summers in and around Denver, where it might be 90 degrees one day and 65 degrees the next, all punctuated by afternoons where the wind would blow hard for ten minutes. Sometimes the thunderstorm was for you, but usually it was for no one in particular.

Then I moved to Tennessee, where summer was hot and humid, and the bugs in the woods were more numerous and often louder than the birds. There is something about being in the south which gives one respect for the awesome power of God. Even though we had a covered porch, I remember opening the front door during a thunderstorm and having the wind rip the door out of my hand. My wife invited her friends from Utah to come and visit, and I still remember hearing this lady say during a thunderstorm, “This is the worst storm I’ve ever seen.” I told her, “This is just about average here, we’ve had several bigger ones than this already this summer.” Yet even though the temperature and the humidity were high and the weather and the bugs were fierce, I wouldn’t have traded those summers for summer anywhere else. I got used to the rain, and to my surprise, I really liked it.

But summer and I aren’t getting along well anymore. I’m lucky if I get a week off during summer, and the only way I could get the summer off now would be to get laid off for the fourth time, which I can’t afford. We are now in the second month of what I call the six months of summer in Arizona. June is incredibly hot, with the daily temperatures near or above 110 degrees. The humidity often hovers at about 4%, and combined with the heat, a few minutes in the sun makes my face feel like it’s going to split into a million little cactus pieces. Worse still is the fact that my advancing age and thinning hair now make it possible to get a sunburn on the top of my head. I need to get a hat, because I’m already trying to recover from my first summer headburn. It eventually will rain a little bit in July, but it makes me chuckle when the locals refer to it as a monsoon. Clearly these people have never been to Nashville, where the rain comes down by the bucketful. Only Arizonans could refer to a dust storm as a monsoon.

They say it’s a dry heat, but I can say with great confidence that today’s 75 degrees in Nashville is more comfortable than the 109 degrees in Phoenix. It’s true that a humid day makes a hot day feel hotter, but probably never by more than 10 or 15 degrees. It’s probably nearly 20 degrees hotter every summer day in Phoenix than it is in Nashville, and summers in this part of Arizona are far more unpleasant than the hot and humid summers in most of the south. For those who can’t stand humidity, Albuquerque is probably nearly 20 degrees cooler every day than Phoenix, and the climate is dry and fairly comfortable throughout the year. I don’t understand why millions of people want to live in the unbearable wasteland called Phoenix, where summer begins on the first of May and lasts until the end of October, and I sure do miss Nashville’s rain.

But the weather here during the summer also reminds me that my five minute trip to work in Nashville has become a 90-minute trip each way on the bus in Arizona with people I don’t want to be on the bus with. Besides, no one I worked with in Tennessee ever got on my nerves, and almost everyone here does. The Phoenix metropolitan area is filled with a transient population, including me, who haven’t been here long. Like us, most people in Phoenix probably don’t have a swimming pool, and worse yet, people here seem totally disconnected with each other. Low wages, no pool, few friends and six months of unbearable heat don’t appeal to me.

But all of these negative feelings about spending another summer in Arizona remind me also of why I always liked the story of Joseph in the Old Testament. Most sermons about Joseph focus on his refusal to have sex with Potipher’s wife, but there is something more compelling about the story of Joseph for me than that. Joseph spent most of his life in Egypt, a place he never wanted to go to, but could never leave. Yet he made the most of his time, literally in prison, and figuratively in the prison of being away from home. In the end, all he asked was that his descendants would bring his bones home four hundred years after he died, which they did. I’ve spent much of my life in places where I would not have chosen to go. I moved to Arizona, because I had a job offer here which I didn’t feel I could afford to turn down, even though it paid much less money than I had made previously. If God is willing, I hope I and my family can leave Arizona someday, and sooner would be better than later. Otherwise, may we live here like Joseph, developing character as he did, as one of the original wandering Jews.

WHY NOT JUST MOW THE LAWN

One of my neighbors is a buddhist. My wife was outside pulling weeds the other day, and she asked him if he knew someone who might be willing to come by occasionally and take care of our lawn. He didn’t recommend anyone, but he said, “Just look under lawn care in the phone book. Try to find someone who is oriental, because most of them are Buddhists, they care about nature and they know how to develop a relationship with your lawn, instead of just mowing it.” I was not a party to this conversation, but my wife said she didn’t respond to him, and her attitude was “whatever”, which is the word women use when a man aims badly toward a woman’s wishes and misses a bullseye by a million miles. It is experience, not the dictionary, which has taught me the meaning of “whatever”.

I really wish I would have been there, because I would not have been able to resist the urge to begin deprogramming this guy. I don’t have a problem with the “Look in the phone book under lawn care.” advice; I might have said that myself. But I am puzzled by his insistance that we should find a human being who is capable of having a relationship with our lawn. When I was in the fifth grade, I did have a crush on a girl whose last name was Meadows, and that’s as close to a relationship with a lawn as I’ve ever been. I’m hopelessly out of touch with nature now. If I wanted to have a relationship with a lawn, I suspect I would need to be a little more lawn-like myself, but I have never been able to green up during the summer, as a good lawn should. Come to think of it, why would a patch of grass need a relationship in the first place? I’m thinking of starting a web site called lharmony.com for the grassy among us who are lonely.

I think we’ll just look for a male teenager who wants a few extra dollars he can use to pursue a relationship with a female teenager, perhaps even one whose last name is Meadows. If he has a relationship with my lawn, I don’t want to know about it. It will be hard enough to come up with $20 to pay someone to mow the lawn, much less an additional $35 to have someone chant “green peace” to it.

All of this reminds me of Paul Harvey’s Christmas story about the birds. The story is about a man who decides to stay home on Christmas Eve, instead of attending church with the rest of his family. While he is reading a book, he begins hearing thudding sounds against his window, and he goes out to investigate. It is snowing, and he finds some birds flying around, trying to keep warm. He tries to show them the path to his barn where they could keep warm, but they scatter in every direction instead. He eventually realizes that in order for him to show the birds what to do, he would need to be a bird himself. He then remembers the Christmas story about the divine Jesus coming to earth to live among us as a man in order to show us how to live. The story ends with the man kneeling in the snow and accepting Christ. I don’t know for sure if that story is true, because I can’t recall an actual man’s name associated with it. But my point is that God becoming man in order to have relationships with men makes much more sense to me than men having relationships with lawns, or anything else in nature. As far as I know, my grass needs a little sun, a little water, and a good mowing now and then, and I need better neighbors, either new or improved.

PRESERVING OUR NATIONAL IDENTITY

Every American with a sound mind above the age of ten should be familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s quote from the Declaration of Independence which says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson’s argument is a legal argument, based on the notion that everyone’s legal rights and obligations are equal, and society is therefore obligated to reward or punish men and women without regard to their ethnic background, religion, gender, social status, wealth, etc. This Jeffersonian concept of equality is not only the bedrock of the American legal system, but this sort of equality has theological underpinnings as well.

However, arguing that all men are legally equal does not mean that all men are identical, equal, and therefore interchangeable. I am the father of two sons who have absolutely the same right to the affection of their parents, yet from the moment of birth, they have been very, very different children. One has a quiet voice, one is louder than a bulldozer. From infancy, one of them was terrified of dogs, the other loves dogs and wants to become a veterinarian. One can’t control his emotions very well and cries uncontrollably about minor scratches and scrapes, the other one nearly lost a finger and barely cried long enough for us to notice. One of them speaks fairly well, but doesn’t like to do homework, because he doesn’t like to write. The other one has speech problems, but can write or draw anything. We have a gulper and a sipper, one who loves TV, and one who could easily do without it. Every parent who has more than one child has to resist the natural tendency toward favoritism which could be justified by certain behaviors, yet favoritism as a parent is morally inexcusable, at least until the children are adults, and perhaps even then.

Just as children from the same family may be quite different, nations which are part of the human family are quite different. Japanese and Koreans are not identical or interchangeable. Neither are Germans and Poles, neither are Mexicans and Americans.

I hear a lot of fine arguments from conservatives about how people who have violated our existing immigration laws should not be given a path to citizenship, especially not a path that puts them ahead of those who have tried to go through the immigration process legally. That argument may be valid, but it will never win the debate Americans are having about immigration. There’s certainly a valid reason to close the border to illegals because of the possibility of terrorism, but we’re unbelievably complacent about that too, and that argument by itself will not carry the day, though I think it should. It will not help to say that the United States simply can’t absorb everyone who wants to come here, though it’s true.

The left has made a determined attempt to change the language from illegal immigrants to undocumented workers, implying that these are just people who have lost or misplaced their papers. The obvious solution for them is for us to give them papers, and that will fix everything. As ridiculous as that notion is, I believe that is exactly what we’re going to do. It’s what Democrats want, it’s what the senate wants, it’s what George Bush wants, and it doesn’t matter to any of them whether or not that’s what most Americans want.

I predict conservatives will lose the debate about immigration because we are either unwilling, unable, or too intimidated by the charge of racism to speak openly about the historic differences, and the differences which still exist between the United States and Mexico, where most illegal immigrants come from.

I don’t pretend to be an expert about Mexican culture, but there are a few points which are relatively obvious. I believe that legal protections and penalties have never been applied to everyone equally in Mexico, meaning that the well-connected and the wealthy can get away with things or can make things they want happen much more easily than their less favored counterparts. If we bring Mexicans into the United States in relatively small numbers, they will be likely to become assimilated into American society, American values and the relatively equal (though far from perfect) American way of doing things. If we allow millions and millions of Mexicans to come up here at once (especially without having to go through a valid legal process), they will bring their culture with them, and it will change our society more than we will change theirs, to the detriment of all of us.

Until recently, Mexico was ruled by one political party for more than 70 years. If Americans give undisputed control of the United States to any political party for more than 70 years, I’m convinced we will have political corruption and bribery on a scale we have never seen. Mexico has never had a competitive political system, and uncontrolled illegal immigration will eventually produce a corrupt one-party system in the United States as well.

I also want to make a more controversial point, yet a point which I believe is justifiable. When I was in college, one of my best friends was a foreign student from Mexico. Keep in mind that this was a man I really liked. One day I asked him, “I know that a lot of Americans go down to Mexico as tourists. But other than tourism, what industries does Mexico have? What can Americans import more of from Mexico, or what sort of businesses flourish in Mexico?” I thought that was a reasonable question, but I was astonished by his answer. He said, “It took Mexico longer to rid ourselves of the Spanish and the French, and we have not had enough time as an independent people to develop our own industries.” I didn’t reply to him, but I gave it some thought. Mexico has plenty of natural resources, particularly oil, which they could use to develop their own industries. But they don’t develop their own industries, and they don’t want to sell their oil to gringos. On the other hand, the British had barely left the United States for ten years when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. After that came clipper ships, the sewing machine, the telegraph, the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, the automobile, the airplane, the atom bomb, space capsules and the personal computer. Americans have kept our patent office very busy.

When I spoke with my friend from Mexico about this, it was probably 1973. Mexico had been independent of the French for more than a hundred years, but I couldn’t think of a single Mexican invention. Whatever the reason for that is, it has nothing to do with time. I’m not arguing that Mexicans are lazy. In fact, I don’t even claim to understand why Mexicans have been historically less industrious. I am also not arguing that Americans are necessarily superior to Mexicans, and I’m certainly not saying they should want to be just like we are. On the contrary, they have their own proper place in the human family, they have the same Creator, and I genuinely believe he loves Mexicans every bit as much as he loves Americans. My argument is not about the superiority of one nation over another. My argument is simply that just as my two sons have different personalities, the United States and Mexico have two different national personalities, and we Americans should care about preserving ours. Believe me, the people of Mexico are not eager to be Americanized, and we should not be fond of the Mexicanization of America.

Every nation has sources of national pride. Maybe in Mexico they’re proud of playing soccer better than we do. Everyone who speaks both English and Spanish fluently says Spanish is a more beautiful and expressive language. Fair enough. I cheerfully acknowledge that there may be things which are part of Mexican culture which Americans would do well to adopt.

But we Americans are entitled to some sources of national pride, and we are entitled to openly ask questions like, “How long would it have taken Mexicans to put a man on the moon?” I don’t question that Mexico could put a man on the moon, but I doubt if they ever would. My argument is not that they are less capable, but only that they have different desires. We’re going to lose the battle over immigration because we have lost our ability to speak of the United States as a good place, or to speak of Americans with the same pride every other nation possesses about its own.

I know the left screams racism when someone dares to say that Mexicans and Americans are legally equal, but they are not identical or interchangeable as citizens, but it’s not racism and it is the truth. I don’t mind if my children learn to speak Spanish, but I want them to be Americans culturally, and I want everyone in the United States to be loyal to the United States, regardless of their ethnic background or birthplace. I’m not ashamed to say that I want Mexicans who we allow to come to the United States to become Americanized, but I don’t want America to become Mexicanized. The American ship of state will sink unless we are willing to say this publicly. We’re going to lose the battle to preserve our borders, language and culture, because the left has persuaded too many of us that we have no right to a national identity. Yes, we have always been a nation of immigrants. But until recently, we have never been a nation of uncontrolled immigration.

If we Americans have no right to a national identity, we’re the only ones who don’t. Mexico doesn’t have an easy path to immigration and citizenship. In the United States, Henry Kissinger and many others who weren’t born here have achieved powerful positions. I think that’s good, but those opportunities are non-existent in every other nation I know of, certainly in Mexico.

Ask the Japanese if they would be willing to lose their national identity and allow an unlimited number of foreigners to come to Japan, both inside and outside of the laws of Japan. I don’t know what their answer would be, but it might include a Japanese obscenity.

Though hispanics may enjoy seeing their numbers in this country rise, they have good reason to be offended about the way it’s being done. First of all, the disgusting argument that we need Mexicans to do jobs Americans won’t do seems quite reminiscent to me of the arguments which were used to bring slaves from Africa. I want fewer Mexicans to come here, but I don’t want anyone to come here as a second-class citizen. It is a very sad commentary about the state of Mexico that many Mexicans would rather be here as second-class citizens than to be first-class citizens in their own country.

Also, I read stories almost daily about the squalid and inhumane conditions under which illegals are brought here. 56 Mexicans were locked in a refrigerator truck in Laredo, Texas recently, and they would have frozen to death if someone hadn’t notified the authorities. 91 illegals were found in a truck, stacked on each other like firewood. 18 illegals were found in a house with no electricity and no running water, just raw sewage and trash everywhere. The left says, “Give them maps and water, give them amnesty and make them legal immigrants.” But that won’t make the problem go away. It will make the problem double, triple and quadruple. As for Mexicans, they should really passionately hate coyotes. They have more reason to be angry about human smuggling than we do.

Everyone has a political agenda when it comes to the issue of illegal immigration. My objective is to see American culture, sovereignty and territorial integrity preserved. Unfortunately, some Americans want to use illegal immigrants to drive down wages and provide a larger pool of unskilled laborers. The Mexican government also has an agenda, the Trojan horse of reconquista and exporting poverty, crime and even diseases like tuberculosis, problems which the Mexican government has no desire to address in Mexico.

It bothers me, as a lifelong American citizen, that there have been 216 incursions into the territory of the United States by the Mexican military during the last ten years. In past generations, any one of those incursions would have been considered as an act of war, and they would have drawn a military response, as Pancho Villa did in 1916. I’m not asking for a war with Mexico, but it is reasonable to ask why our politicians in both parties pretend not to notice, and it’s worth asking how many incursions or how large an offensive it will take to illicit any official response at all.

The immigration bill just passed by the senate is too complex for me to respond to in great detail here. But generally speaking, I think it’s a Trojan horse which will finish off what little is left of our national identity as Americans. Every day I live in the United States seems more like listening to the band play on the Titanic. I don’t favor any change in our current immigration laws until we first close the border (by force, if necessary), and we make it clear that we are willing and determined to enforce the laws we already have. Not until then should we think about how our immigration laws should change or decide what to do with the illegal immigrants who are already here. I believe their legal status is actually less important than enforceable borders and our national sovereignty.

Unfortunately, given current trends, I believe there is one thing which might stem the tide of illegal immigration. I’m afraid the next major act of terrorism on American soil won’t just kill three thousand people, but perhaps three million or ten million. That may turn the tide, but it isn’t something anyone should look forward to. If it comes to that, it will be interesting to see how many of today’s illegals will want to stay when they realize that their presence here makes them candidates for indiscriminate Moslem target practice. As for me, I’m praying, I’m staying, I have nowhere else to go.

THE GREATEST TELEVISION SERIES EVER

When I was a small child, we had never heard of cable television, and I am old enough to remember when the local network stations signed off, and to recall the test patterns before they signed back on in the morning. I’m not very fond of television as a medium. TV isn’t just a mindless wasteland, it’s a trash can filled with flies. It would sure be easy to write about how awful today’s television is. But just this once, I would like to say something positive about what used to be a staple of television, and what one can still find in syndication.

When our TV was on, it was usually tuned to what my father liked, and what my father liked was westerns. “Gunsmoke”, “Have Gun Will Travel”, “The Rifle Man”, “Wagon Train”, “Rawhide”, “Cheyenne” and “Bonanza” were in our house more often than bread or milk. Because my father was an alcoholic, our home was sometimes a violent place and my parents separated when I was nine, I grew up hating westerns. Westerns vanished from TV by the end of the 1960s, and I was glad to see them go.

But one afternoon during the 1970s, when I didn’t have very much to do, I actually sat down and watched an episode of “Bonanza”, which by then was in syndication, having been replaced by “Little House on the Prairie” and “The Waltons”. “Bonanza” was sort of the grandfather of those shows, and very much to my surprise, I discovered that I liked it. I often thought “Bonanza” would have been better if there had been at least one woman among the Cartwrights, but perhaps “Bonanza” was just what it should have been, a celebration of masculine characters and values which television today is alergic to.

I remember one episode, in particular, about a painter who was losing his sight. At the beginning of the episode, this man and the Cartwrights were in a saloon, and this man was being as much of a nuisance as possible, trying to pick a fight with someone. Eventually, Lorne Greene hits the man and fights with him, though the man is nearly blind. I won’t recount the rest of the episode, but it’s about someone who is becoming disabled who is trying to get others to treat him normally and being more concerned about being patronized because of his disability than by the practical limits of the disability itself. I was very impressed that “Bonanza” was willing to tackle a subject like this, an issue which is more complex than most Sunday morning sermons. I don’t hate westerns anymore, even if network executives do. I will probably require my sons to watch a few episodes of “Bonanza” before they grow up. It should be part of every boy’s education, and it may even be as useful as Sunday school.

THE ERROR OF MODERATION

Like many Americans, I once believed in the addage, “moderation in all things”. Many Americans look at the Gallup poll and decide it’s best not to stray too far from the safe center of public thought and perception. There was a time when I too wanted to be a moderate with regard to politics, ethics and religion. But I have been persuaded over time that it is best to resist the gravitational force of peer pressure and moderation. After all, moderates in Germany supported Hitler in the 1930s, and a lot of those moderates were killed during allied air raids in the 1940s. Moderation is not always helpful, and it is becoming less and less helpful these days.

My disgust with what is often called moderation reached a crescendo on the Tuesday when my oldest son was born. It was a primary election day in some states. I remember hearing on the news that day that extremist (which meant pro-life) Republican candidates had beaten back challenges from moderate (pro-abortion) Republicans in the primaries in Michigan, Kansas and Washington. I gave up moderation forever that day when I realized that extremists want to save babies and moderates want to kill more and more of them. As the old Russian proverb says, “There is no news in the truth, and there is no truth in the news.” More and more often, I read news articles which I believe are a deliberate attempt to distort reality. The news these days may not be completely fiction, but it’s usually more accurate to call it propaganda than news.

Out of disgust with moderation, I named my son Steven, spelled differently but named after Stephen, the first Christian martyr, a man who was killed for telling the truth to his generation. I hope my son will tell the truth to his generation, but I also realize that that task may not be as much a part of his calling, as it is of mine. After all, I have already developed a passion for passing along uncomfortable truths to people, which is one of my primary purposes
for blogging.

I remember an ad campaign during the 1970s for a tampon “developed by women for women, and they named it Rely”. The implication of the ads was that nothing developed by men could be good for women, and it was a slick piece of feminist propaganda, which I hated because no man would ever resent something developed by women. Pardon the expression, but men grow up “relying” on women for a lot of things, but women were told not to “rely” on men for anying. Unfortunately, Rely caused toxic shock syndrome in some women, killing a few and making others very, very ill, and Rely was removed from the market. I’m sorry for Rely’s victims, but I have to confess that I derived some personal satisfaction from the fact that they should have named it Unreliable, because that’s what it was. Beware of gender hatred, no matter how slickly packaged. I’m not fond of all women individually, but I am fond of some of them. I’m generally fond of the female gender, and I think it is the duty of women to be generally fond of men, even given the fact that some of us are jerks.

SPORTS: THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES

On February 16, 1991, I spent the evening at the John Huntsman Center, where the University of Utah plays basketball. Utah was playing B.Y.U. that night. I like college basketball, but I was sort of there by accident, without the slightest bit of fondness for either team. My wife and I were engaged then, and she has a Mormon friend, who is a B.Y.U. graduate who invited us to the game.

Utah won the game, but I don’t remember the final score or much about it. What I rmember most is the halftime presentation the University of Utah made in honor of one of their most loyal fans, a man in his 70s who had attended every Utah home game for nearly 50 years. During the presentation, they asked him what his favorite memory from a half century of Utah basketball was. Much to my surprise, he said his favorite memory was a game on January 11, 1964 when Utah hit a shot in the closing seconds to beat New Mexico. There was absolutely no discernible reaction from the Utah crowd, who had obviously forgotten or never knew about this game from 27 years earlier. He and I were probably the only two people in the arena who remembered that game. But I remember it in a very different way. I was ten years old, listening to the game on the radio in Albuquerque, and I cried at the end. He never forgot the thrill, and I never forgot the disappointment.

I really wished I could have met that man, because there is now sort of a brotherhood between us, though he may not be alive anymore. I’ve often thought about the conversation we could have had. I’m not fond of his team, but I’m fond of his loyalty to them. We could have talked at length about the game (I even remember the halftime score, as well as the 67-65 final), we could have talked about the players, but we would have talked mostly about his loyalty to the Utes and my loyalty to the Lobos. I don’t think I could have resisted the temptation to remind him that New Mexico won the second meeting between those two teams by 28 points (93-65) in Albuquerque on March 7, 1964.

If we could have talked long enough, perhaps we would have gotten to the real point. For me, the real point is not the final score of any game, but simply that I like Albuquerque more than I like Salt Lake City, and 800 consecutive Utah victories over New Mexico in every sport wouldn’t change my mind. I would tell him about the annual balloon fiesta and riding up to Sandia Crest on the tram. Then he would tell me about the mountains east of Salt Lake City and the winter skiing, and I hope he would have told me that his love for the state of Utah extends far beyond the exploits of any team there. Then we would walk away as friends, with a shared memory, a different perspective and an appreciation for the other’s point of view.

Not only did I enjoy cheering for New Mexico when I was growing up, but I liked sports in general, perhaps because it was the only real drama on TV. Even when I don’t have a particular rooting interest, I enjoy watching a game when both teams really play well enough to deserve to win. There is something about having watched the 1975 World Series between Boston and Cincinnati, for example, which can’t adequately be explained to people who have never followed sports to its greatest moments of triumph and disappointment. I was watching a game one day when a woman stopped by to visit my mom. She went on and on about how she hated sports and she thought I should find something better to do. When I’d finally heard enough of it, I stopped her and said, “You’re right. They should take all of the sports off TV so we could watch “General Hospital” seven days a week.” That shut her up.

But that was before we had cable, before ESPN, before curling, lacrosse, beach volleyball and poker were on TV, before 24-hour sports stations on the radio with shows usually moderated by very rude “experts”, before steroids and too many other scandals to mention. I confess now that I’m nostalgic about shorter seasons and a time when perhaps only the deciding game of the World Series would make the national news. I’m nostalgic for a time when no college had a rape scandal associated with athletics, real or imagined. Dare I say that I miss the days when a team couldn’t get to the World Series without winning the American or the National League penant? I enjoy the NCAA basketball tournament, yet I’m somehow irritated by the notion that teams who don’t even have a winning record within their conference are qualified to compete for a national championship. I liked things better when teams were given championships because they were good every time they played, not because they finally played well enough to win after a long series of mediocre performances.

I’m tired of hearing as much about what players are paid as I do about how they play. I’m tired of players turning pro before they graduate from the college which gave them a scholarship. It isn’t so much that I mind them playing professionally, but try to imagine a world where people fulfill and finish their commitments and where universities aren’t just football and basketball factories. I’m tired of the NCAA putting universities on probation, with penalties usually paid by players and coaches who had nothing to do with the original infractions.

I would prefer a time when no one used steroids and no one needed to be banned from baseball for life. I actually think it would be neat if professional athletes sometimes had to go out and get real jobs during the offseason. I want to redesign things so that taxpayers are never asked to cough up hundreds of millions of dollars to publicly finance a new stadium for millionaires, with more and more luxury boxes and ticket prices which are so high that average working people can’t go to the games anymore.

Too many college and professional athletes have been arrested for crimes from drug possession to murder. I’ve heard too many obscenities chanted by crowds of probably drunken fans who should know better. There have been too many fights between teams before, during and after games. One too many coaches has used a fifth down to win a game and justified it later, and one too many players has illegally pushed his teammate into the end zone for my comfort.

Though it was a freak accident no one could have foreseen or prevented, I used to live near a former Colorado football player who was paralyzed in a game against Oregon. I would much rather that he had had a normal life, than to break his neck in pursuit of a final score no one remembers anyway. Nothing could be worse than having a girl killed celebrating her thirteenth birthday at a hockey game, or having one bonfire too many at Texas A&M. I don’t want to watch a triple crown horse race where the favored horse breaks his leg instead of winning the race. Of course, I know that accidents are unavoidable, in and out of sports. But I’m starting to feel like the proverbial truck driver who has witnessed just one too many. For some reason, as I get older, it’s harder and harder to get over these things or to forget about them. I’m glad I’ve never been interested in hockey, because if I had to go to a hockey game, I’m afraid I would cry.

I’m not writing this from the standpoint of someone who just doesn’t care for athletics; quite to the contrary. I’m writing this because I have gradually come to believe that sports has exceeded its natural and proper role in society, and I believe that too many men spend too much time watching, talking and thinking about things which are really peripheral to their lives. Imagine that, coming from someone who onced memorized rosters, statistics and final scores. As I’ve said, I appreciate the loyalty of sports fans and I enjoy the drama sporting events often provide. I used to watch Monday night football as if it were a civic obligation. Though I may occasionally catch a few minutes of a Monday night game, my interest has waned to the point that I haven’t watched an entire Monday night game for 20 years. Just like Los Angeles, I’ve learned to live without the NFL. There was a time that whenever I heard guys talking about sports, I would join the conversation and offer the pearls of a spectator’s wisdom. But when I hear those conversations today, I wish they would talk about their lives, their wives and their children instead. I’m getting old and cranky, I’ve been there and done that, I’m starting to forget the final scores, and I’m starting to care more about everything else in the world–well, except for “General Hospital”. Most of all, I’m beginning to worry that sports are producing rankor among people, not the bond of brotherhood I have with Utah’s biggest fan, who, for at least one night, was one of my favorite people in the world.

COMING TO A CEMETERY NEAR YOU

Although I haven’t actually met him yet, I first encountered the grim reaper on Monday afternoon, November 4, 1963, after I returned home from an otherwise unmemorable day of fifth grade. The grim reaper, hereafter known as GR, had kept an appointment with my grandmother, a surprise appointment to her and to the rest of us. My grandmother was 60 years old (six times as old as I was), so I thought perhaps it was her time, since I viewed 60-year-old people as quite elderly at that time. Nevertheless, I was disgusted by GR’s timing and method. She was in a doctor’s office, waiting for an appointment with a doctor to talk about the chest pains she had been having, when she suffered a fatal heart attack. I hope she didn’t suffer for very long. It was very unfair of GR to take her from a doctor’s office where she had gone to hide from him, and it seemed odd to me that the doctor hadn’t come out and rescued her.

It was less than three weeks later on November 22, 1963, when I learned that GR has friends among us. I had just gone to the school cafeteria for lunch when I heard that Lee Harvey Oswald, along with his friends, Fidel Castro, the mafia, the CIA, Nikita Krushchev and the Russians, and perhaps even LBJ himself, had set up an appointment with GR for JFK. I have an alibi–ask anyone who was in fifth grade at my school. What a somber weekend that was, with everyone in front of the TV because they didn’t want to listen to the funeral music on the radio. So we sat and listened to the news all weekend, even though we knew the news, and the news anchors had 72 hours to tell us over and over what we already knew. We didn’t venture out until Sunday, when we visited family friends who had a cabin east of town. We were listening to the news on their TV when GR struck again, using one of his friends to introduce himself to the very young Lee Harvey Oswald. Imagine the gall of GR, to do this right on TV, with children like me watching.

It was the next day when I first heard about one of GR’s other friends. On the day of President Kennedy’s funeral, the Boston strangler killed his eleventh victim. He had to do this eleven times before the news reached all the way from the banks of the river Charles to the Rio Grande. GR was very busy that November. It’s a wonder he didn’t die from exhaustion. To this day, he is still keeping appointments, mostly with the unsuspecting and the unprepared. As he was that November, he is heartless, unfair and unphased by our tears of protest. He sometimes catches us in the midst of our pursuits, and sometimes he won’t come, even when it seems he’s running late for the appointment. His schedule is unknown to us. His unannounced visits and his terrible methods cause most of us to ignore his existence as much as possible. But there are days like September 11, 2001, when he jolts us out of our complacency, reminding us that just as he has kept his appointments with so many others, he will keep his appointment with us.

I have a friend from my college days who grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, right in the shadow of the atomic bomb. Her name is Lois, and I always refer to her home town as Lois Alamos. I always thought it was such a wonderful irony that one of the nicest people on this earth could grow up in a place which is most famous for mankind’s most fearful weapon. But I have come to believe that this is not an unusual sort of irony, and that GR cannot cover up his one and only weakness. Even though we are all mortal, GR made the mistake two thousand years ago of killing the author of life, which led to the resurrection of Christ, and the hope for the resurrection of anyone in the human race who puts their confidence in him. GR has been badly outmaneuvered. His weakness is that he reminds us of eternity, eternity reminds us of our Creator, and our Creator has provided a solution for the two great human problems of sin and death. “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23, NASB)

There is a point in our lives when many of us frequently attend weddings. If we live long enough, we may reach a time when we attend a lot of funerals. A number of factors are coming together in the world which make me suspect that GR will be keeping an unusually busy schedule, and that we’ve only seen the beginning of his work in our times. Yet in the midst of his pursuits, when we are more disgusted with him than ever, GR himself will be put out of business forever, because he too has a fatal weakness. What a wonderful irony it will be when GR is stopped in his tracks without warning, when graves are opened and his captives go free. “Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we (who trust Christ for salvation) will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory.”" (1 Corinthians 15:51-54, NASB)

SOLOMON, ROOSEVELT AND SOCIALISM

Approximately 3,000 years ago, a man named Solomon wrote, “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like a robber and scarcity like an armed man.” For emphasis, this saying of Solomon’s is repeated twice in the Bible, in Proverbs 6:10-11 and Proverbs 24:33-34. The notion that one should work to eat, and failure to work would bring starvation was reinforced by the everyday realities of the largely agricultural society in which Solomon lived, and it eventually became known to many Americans as the Protestant work ethic, though it may well have been equally prevalent among Catholics and Jews.

No matter what anyone believes about how Europeans treated native Americans when they came to this continent or how Americans treated blacks during the days of slavery, no one should question the industriousness of the Americans of many generations. We once farmed our land so well that we could have fed much of the world. When I was growing up, exporting American wheat to Russians who didn’t farm so well was constantly in the news. Most of what was invented in the world for two centuries was invented by Americans, from the cotton gin to the airplane and the personal computer I’m using. Americans built a trans-continental railroad, the Panama canal, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover dam, the Eisenhower tunnel, the Empire State building, the Twin Towers, etc. I believe these things were done by men and women who were afraid of idleness and worked to survive.

But we Americans don’t seem to be afraid of idleness anymore, and I’ve begun thinking about why. Perhaps it began when most Americans left the farm and moved to the city. People who work the land know very well that failing to plant when it’s time to plant or failing to harvest when it’s time to harvest brings poverty and starvation. Local business owners understand the value of work, and the value of good help. But most city dwellers are not business owners, and my liberal friends are fond of saying that one can work at Wal-Mart and starve too. It is true that people who work in cities often don’t see the immediate, or even the long-term fruits of their labor, even if they’re well paid.

But more than anything else, I believe it’s government which systematically destroys the work ethic which built this nation. It might be that Franklin Roosevelt was just being pragmatic when he gave us the new deal and social security. FDR certainly can’t be blamed for the depression or the world war Americans had to fight while he was president, but he did start us down the road to socialism and a sense that someone else will take care of us.

The sense of entitlement in America is now so great that our leaders couldn’t get to the microphone fast enough to assure us that the government would gladly spend up to $250 billion to rebuild the city of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Certainly Katrina was a difficult human tragedy, in terms of the lives lost and the people who were displaced. Yet I was shocked, not only by the fact that President Bush was blamed for the hurricane, but by Oprah Winfrey crying on TV, and the constant display of unchallenged anger and demands for immediate rescue at any cost. I am sorry for the people of New Orleans, but even sorrier that we live in a society where no one can dare state the obvious, that it probably isn’t a good idea to have a major city below sea level, a city which is sinking even deeper. No one dared say that nature won this battle, and nature will win the next one, and it might be better if most people lived on higher ground. The notion that people have known for many years that Katrina was a possibility and didn’t plan for it was drowned out by Oprah’s tears and the screams about delay, anger and racism. The tragedy was real enough, but there were also exaggerated claims of victimhood. No one seems to care about the implications of living in a society where others owe us more than we would do for ourselves.

There was a lot of talk in the 1990s about the failure of social entitlement programs and the need to get people off of welfare. I have been on unemployment insurance three times, and even though unemployment benefits are small, I am well aware how necessary they seem during periods of unemployment. I’m not arguing for the elimination of all government benefits, but it is true that every hand which reaches out for a handout causes the government to take more money out of the hands of working people.

But that’s a very incomplete picture of what government is doing to the traditional work ethic. I have seen government from the inside. There are hard-working professionals in the government, but they are in the minority. Many government employees waste massive amounts of time and care very little about being as productive as possible on the taxpayers’ nickel. They use more sick leave, they come in late, they leave early, and some of them chat endlessly with their co-workers when they are at work. Yet they generally have more job security than their counterparts in the private sector, and government procedures make it difficult to dismiss them and shield them from their lack of effort, which creates a situation where they believe they are wise and Solomon was a fool. To make matters worse, it is much easier in a victim-based entitlement culture to whine for more and bigger government programs than it is to argue against them, and government, like all human organizations, loves to grow.

American ingenuity is on the decline, and it’s no accident that we are falling behind in education, in technology, in manufacturing, in customer service, etc. It’s almost impossible anymore to buy a desk or a chair which doesn’t have to be assembled at home. I learned this the hard way years ago, when I bought a desk, which turned out to be desk pieces when it was delivered.

I don’t think it’s just by accident that we have gone during my lifetime from being a nation which was able to put a man on the moon in less than a decade to a nation which now can’t solve our energy problems. The nation which once harnessed the atom in four years now stands by helplessly as the price of oil heads toward $100 a barrel. We can’t find new energy alternatives, we can’t even drill for our own oil in Alaska or offshore. We can’t build new refineries. We can’t keep our airlines or our auto makers healthy. We can’t keep manufacturing jobs in this country, or even computer programming or customer service jobs. We can’t finish the wars we fight. We can’t deport twelve million illegal immigrants. We can’t close our borders, even though everyone else closes theirs. We can’t prevent our children from having sex before marriage. We can’t even define marriage anymore. We can’t lower the divorce rate. We can’t win the war on drugs. We can’t stop identity theft. We can’t prevent hundreds of thousands of acres of forest from burning up every summer. We can’t get rid of tenured America-hating professors who can’t even bless the society which gave them tenure. As we become less and less self-reliant and our list of “we can’ts” gets longer and longer, so does the list of our demands for others to do for us. I didn’t mean to imply that we can’t help the people of New Orleans. My argument is only that we shouldn’t rebuild the same city in the same way, because nature has destroyed it and nature will destroy it again. Real Americans never say “we can’t.” Real Americans can and do make things better, and real Americans work so they can provide for their families and serve others. A couple of years ago, a blind man climbed Mount Everest, and he didn’t do it by whining about his disability. Remember that the next time someone says “we can’t.” In the short term, it is possible to make Solomon appear foolish by offering economic security and tenure to people and insulating them from their lack of productivity. But in the long term, Solomon’s warning to us will still stand, except that this time it will cause a whole nation to go from wealth to poverty, not just the impoverishment and collapse of one individual.

EVERYTHING IS BROKEN

“Everything is broken” is the title of an old Bob Dylan song, and it is also a fairly accurate description of everything my wife and I own. During the summer of 2001, I was laid off from a computer programming job for the third time, for the second time in two and a half years. I got home during the middle of the day, but my wife, my four-year-old son and my infant son, who was less than three months old at the time, were gone. When my wife returned, she asked, “Why are you home? Have you been fired?” I told her the bad news. The company which had required two two-hour telephone interviews of me, and had flown me from Denver to Nashville for another day of interviews before they had hired me, a hiring process which literally lasted six months, that same company had taken two minutes to tell me I no longer had a job. My wife cried when I told her we had lost our only source of income. But I told her, “I have lost and found jobs before. A year from now this day won’t matter.”

There’s never a good time to be laid off, but this was especially bad, because we immediately lost our health insurance, and my wife was scheduled for hernea surgery the next week. So we had to buy very expensive Cobra insurance to pay for her operation. Also, we had just purchased non-refundable airline tickets for trips to both Colorado and Montana later that summer.

I wish I had been right that the troubles of that day would soon be forgotten, but we never really have recovered. I did find another job, but it took four months, and it required us to leave Tennessee for about a third less pay. So in addition to the substantial economic costs, we lost the friends we had made, including my wife’s best friend, and we had to start over in a state where we didn’t know anyone. That’s just a normal part of life, but it was a particularly bitter disappointment in this case, because we were well-off financially and very well-adjusted before, as my four-year-old said, “my job burned up.”

We had not sold our house before we moved, so we hired a leasing company to lease it to a family who was supposed to buy it, but didn’t, after two years. It took them four months to find a family to agree to a two-year lease, during which time we were responsible for the rent on an apartment and our old mortgage payments. It took us three years to sell our house in Nashville, a house we didn’t want to leave, and that’s longer than we lived in it. I could go on and on about the leasing company and the family in our home not paying the homeowner’s association dues until a lien was placed on our house, the times our payments from the leasing company were late, or when they stopped paying us altogether, even though the people they put there were still occupying the residence. But we got the house sold, and we were eventually able to purchase one which is approximately the same size. Our housing situation is OK, though our neighbors and our neighborhood are far less desirable.

We loved Tennessee, but we can’t find anything we like about Arizona. Summers in Arizona are much longer and more unbearable than the summers in the hot and muggy south, and Christmas in Arizona feels more like Labor Day elsewhere. More importantly, people in the south have roots, they’re not eager to leave the south and they are generally far more polite and considerate than Arizonans.

On our first visit to Nashville, my wife accidentally left her purse on a chair in the airport while we went to another level to look for our baggage. When we returned to look for her purse, it was still sitting there, and nothing was missing. On another occasion, we went swimming in a Nashville-area lake, and my wallet somehow slipped out of my swimsuit. Before I even missed it, a woman I had never met gave it back to me. In Arizona, our car windows have been smashed twice.

So now we live with our merciless creditors, our broken washer and dryer, our broken dishwasher, our broken vacuum cleaner, our broken dressers and our broken furniture, none of which we can afford to replace. None of us has a good bed to sleep on. Our ceiling fans need to be fixed, and even the remote control for our TV looks like a locomotive ran over it. We would be richer without the remote control, and the TV itself, but that’s another topic. Years ago, when times were good, we bought a leather couch and a leather love seat. I didn’t realize at the time that two active boys would tear our furniture to pieces, rip the cushions off and use them for footballs. We now have the only love seat I have ever seen which has gone through a divorce. We have no retirement savings anymore, we have no college fund, and very minimal life insurance. If someone gave us $100,000 tomorrow, it would vanish within a week, and none of it would be spent frivolously. I don’t have an easy way to make things better, because it would require being retrained for a better-paying job, and being retrained costs money. If it only cost motivation, I could do it, but I’m a little short on money these days. I liked the job I lost and the people I worked with, but the job I have now is necessary, but unpleasant, at best.

Perhaps recovery is possible, or perhaps a miracle is just around the corner, or perhaps this tunnel will go on for a very long time. If it does, I’ll do what Job did and walk with God through it. I’ll continue to love and enjoy my wife, and thank God for the wife I have. I’ll enjoy every moment of the lives of my growing sons, except when I have to discipline them for their misbehavior. Even that will yield its fruit in time. These days are not easy, but they will not be wasted either. My wallet is empty, but I am grateful for thousands of God’s blessings which no amount of money could buy. I have learned what it means to be abased and to abound, to be afflicted, but not crushed, perplexed, but not driven to despair, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed. God has not abandoned us, and if we have failed him, we will learn from it. For now, it is enough to know Christ and to have a good and loving family, even if it is a family under the strain of tough times. I don’t feel discouraged, and I truly can’t recall what loneliness and depression once felt like. I hope no one shares my misfortunes, but I wish all could share my blessings.

THE MAN IN WHITE

The first music I really liked as a boy was country music. That was way back in the early 1960s, in what some might call the Patsy Cline era. But as the 1960s went on, country music began to seem dull and uncreative, and I lost most of my original fondness for it. Ever since then, my feelings toward country music have been lukewarm. I may like individual songs or artists, but I can’t just sit down and listen to a country radio station hour after hour, which I once did.

So when I was hired as a computer programmer to work at a company in the Nashville area in 1999, I wasn’t as excited as I once might have been about moving to Music City, U.S.A. During the nearly two and a half years I lived there, I never went to the Grand Ole Opry, and I basically ignored the country music culture, which is hard to do in Nashville. But one night I had a dream about Johnny Cash. I like quite a few of his old records, but I don’t have a real passion about Johnny Cash, and there isn’t any particular reason why he should ever be in one of my dreams at night. He was still alive then, although he had recently been hospitalized and released. Perhaps his hospital stay, or the wrong pizza topping the night before, inspired the following dream.

I dreamed I was in the audience at a Johnny Cash concert, though I never actually tried to go to one. He came out with his band and said, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” Then he added, “I’m getting pretty old now, and I really don’t like the sound of my voice anymore. I don’t really want to sing tonight. You all know the words, and I would like you to sing instead of me.” No one complained about this reverse concert. The band played and we all sang. We all knew the words, we all sang on key, and we liked doing it, which could only happen in Nashville. It was the least we could do for a country music legend.

Johnny Cash never sang, but he talked to us between our renditions of his hits. This is what he said, and this is why I remember the dream. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes during my life, and I’ve done a lot of things which were wrong. But now I’ve made peace with the God who made peace with me on the cross. You know me as the man in black. But I’m going home to be with Jesus soon, and I’m going to be the man in white.”

It may have been the best sermon I’ve ever heard. I remember being both amused and affected by the dream when I woke up. Johnny Cash is gone now, and I hope he really is the man in white. I hope he won’t fall in to a burning ring of fire.

ADHD: MYTH, REALITY AND EXPERIENCE

When my oldest son was born, one of my most instant impressions was about his extremely high energy level. As a newborn, he seemed to jerk and twitch almost spasmodically. He was a C-section delivery, so I went to the room the hospital had set up for newborns with one of the nurses, while the doctors stitched my wife back up. When I returned to her about 15 minutes later, I distinctly remember saying, “This boy is very active. Some teacher will want to put him on Ritalin.” I was thinking of teachers, but I should have been thinking about his mother.

Of course, children having a lot of energy is not unusual. Any three-year-old has more energy than I do, and I sometimes wish children would loan me some of their natural vitality. But my wife used to observe that my son ran circles around the other kids his age. I remember one time when she was teaching a Sunday school class for children (including my son), and one week I decided to stay to try to help her with the kids, and we had another woman helping us. At the end of the class, when all of the other children were gone and my son was still there, the other woman said, “This boy is really wild.” My wife said, “We know. He’s ours.” He was about two years old at the time.

I am not a trained psychiatrist, psychologist or health professional. But we all have our biases, and this is mine. Growing up in an alcoholic family, and living through the period of the 1960s when recreational drug usage became widespread, I made an ironclad decision that I would not use medication for anything other than the relief of physical pain. I’ve periodically used over-the-counter headache and cold remedies, and I’ve taken stronger medicine when I’ve had kidney stones. Anyone who has had kidney stones knows what it’s like to wish for a miracle or instant death. But when my friends began taking antidepressants in the 1970s, I was opposed to it. For example, a girl I knew in college was taking medication for depression, and I asked her why she felt it was necessary. She said, “if I stop taking it, after a few days I just can’t stop crying.” My response to her was, “Maybe you need to cry. Maybe it’s the healthiest thing you can do, and maybe you’ll never really feel better until you do. Maybe masking your emotions with medication is just going to cause them to build up to an explosion from which you never will recover, or suppress them until you can’t feel anything.” I thought it was a good argument, but it wasn’t persuasive to her. Little did I suspect way back then early in 1973 that she was a trend setter, and conservative me was just stuck in the mud as usual without any of society’s new ideas.

By the 1980s I knew several people on antidepressants, so many that I stopped telling them they needed to cry. I stopped telling them anything. But I have always had the uncomfortable feeling that drug companies are selling more and more pills to more and more of us for more and more reasons. I don’t even like the concept of viagra, and I probably wouldn’t even use it if it were free.

For the purpose of this column, I’ll define attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as a conceptual condition which describes the behavior of persons who are very active, but who seem not to be able to focus on any one thing for very long. The inability to attend to any task for very long has primarily caused young boys to be diagnosed with ADHD, though the drug companies are now eagerly pushing ADHD as a disorder for both genders and people of all ages. Oddly enough, however, ADHD reminds me of a woman I knew many years before I ever heard of ADHD. Back in the bad old days when I was single and I pursued a series of women, this woman was a prospective mother-in-law because of my fondness for her daughter, though she never actually fulfilled the high calling of becoming my mother-in-law. Believe me, a lot of women missed that opportunity. Sometimes when I would call her daughter, my “mother-in-law” would answer the phone, and I was always struck by the sense that she wanted to be polite to me, but she needed to do it quickly, because she had something burning on the stove or something else she needed to do as quickly as possible. I’m sure she had never been diagnosed with ADHD, but her mind always seemed three or four tasks down the road from what she was doing. Maybe that would have eventually gotten on my nerves, but I liked her and I never minded being one of the million things she was trying to focus on. She worked as a school nurse, and it never occurred to me in those days that her behavior might be classified by some as a disorder. She seemed able to harness her energy well enough to use it effectively, and I think many people who would now be diagnosed with ADHD have been doing that for many generations.

When I began hearing more and more about children being medicated because they had been diagnosed with ADHD, and I often wondered if it wasn’t for the convenience of adults, not for the children. Children who are very active, but who don’t focus on one thing very long may be perfectly normal, especially if they also happen to be boys. I have often suspected that part of the ADHD craze is due to female teachers and over-worked single mothers who really don’t know much about masculinity and find it abnormal.

ADHD is a mythological illness. I don’t necessarily mean by that that it isn’t real. What I mean is that it is distinctively not like measles, mumps and chicken pox, which any reasonably well-educated parent can spot. In fact, there is no ADHD test, and parents can’t necessarily count on two professionals agreeing someone has it or doesn’t. However, I have always suspected that if every boy were mandatorily given an ADHD screening by a psychiatrist when they started school, the verdict would be that 50% of boys have full-blown ADHD, 40% have borderline ADHD and the other 10% need to be watched. Psychiatrists don’t want to be out of work. I could donate a kidney to someone (though I don’t think a reasonable person would want one of mine), but I can’t donate my superego, my ego or my id to someone, because they are concepts Freud used to explain behavior. ADHD is a concept, a concept which was foreign to previous generations and might be foreign to future ones. Disorders come and go. If homosexuality were still classified as a disorder, the drug companies would be trying to come up with a pill for it. In fact, I suspect we’re on the verge of a brave new world where we will be offered genetic modifications for what ails us, or what contemporary society thinks ails us. Eventually, these genetic offers will become a mandatory form of social engineering.

But even if ADHD is a concept, my older son has been diagnosed with it, as I always suspected he would be, and we have always had some ongoing behavioral issues with him. For example, he may ask for pizza for dinner. When we tell him pizza is expensive and we have other groceries at home, he sometimes will become upset and plead his case for pizza in an irrational way, saying the same few words over and over, even if we have responded to what he has said. It doesn’t seem as if he’s acting up, it’s more like an old 45 rpm record which is stuck at one point in a song and can’t go forward. We struggle sometimes to jiggle him into a different behavior. Trying to get him to manage his emotions constructively is one of the most difficult tasks I have ever encountered. When he is calm, he is a delightful boy, everyone’s best friend, and seemingly the favorite child of many teachers and adults too. He’s a very nice boy to be around most of the time and I would be very fond of him, even if he weren’t my son. But my wife and I have always struggled with how to tame those moments when he is a stuck 45, when he is not quite with us.

My wife obtained a prescription for Concerta when he was diagnosed. So I had to weigh my concern about my son’s frequent unusual moments against my determination that no son of mine will be drugged by anyone unless hell freezes over repeatedly. My wife was really in favor of the medication, and I was really opposed to it. But 15 years of marriage has taught me that the goal of marriage is unity, not winning every conflict, though losing one for the Gipper is very hard for me. Since my wife doesn’t work outside the home and I do, she spends more time with him, so I gave her permission to try the medication. Believe me, giving in on this one really hurt. Unfortunately, the results were not particularly good. His behavior didn’t improve, and he had a more difficult time sleeping, which actually made his mood swings even worse. She tried cutting back the dose, but we still didn’t get the results we were looking for.

My son’s activity level has diminished now to a point that I don’t think anyone would find him hyperactive, which gives me hope that he’ll overcome this thing I call a concept, but it is still an ongoing issue for us. However, my decision to be flexible has been good for my marriage, which was the reason I gave in, and my wife and I are more or less on the same page as we search for a solution, rather than being at each other’s throats. We don’t have any magic bullets, but we have unity, and unity is critical to both marriage and parenthood.

One thing I noticed about my son when he was little is that although he was usually very active, if we plopped him down in front of a television, he became so engrossed in what he was watching that we couldn’t get his attention. TV doesn’t cause ADHD, but I am convinced it exacerbates it considerably. My other son has always been able to ignore TV when he wants to, but for some reason, ADHD kids can’t. They really need to be kept away from TV as much as possible. The other thing which is observable about my older son is that he does better on days when he has had a lot of sleep, gets some exercise, eats well and avoids snacks. More sleep, more exercise, minimizing stress and better nutrition are helpful, but they don’t resolve his problems. If I come up with any more bright recommendations, I’ll add them to this post.

THE GROWING PUBLIC DECENCY DEFICIT

Yesterday I was riding the bus to work, listening to the bus driver’s awful choice of radio programming. A listener called the morning show to inform the entire city that her boyfriend’s penis is way too short. She asked the morning shock jocks whether she should continue to fornicate with him or find another more well-endowed fornication partner. Of course, my suggestion would be “none of the above”. But we’ve reached a point where my suggestion to find a husband she loves, regardless of the size of his penis, is probably more controversial than what she’s doing.

This may have been staged by the shock jocks, purely or impurely for its “entertainment value”, but that wouldn’t make it any less distasteful. Assuming, however, the caller was a real person with a real boyfriend, it might be reasonable to ask why her private sexual problems should be discussed publicly on a medium where the listeners might include her boyfriend, her own friends and relatives, and worst of all, children of any age. I got my first transistor on my seventh birthday, and I listened to absolutely everything which was on the radio at the time. Fortunately, both for me and my parents, it was pretty tame stuff back then, because broadcasters knew and cared that I might be part of their audience.

Imagine, just for a moment, the boyfriend’s sense of betrayal if he woke up and heard that on the radio. For that reason, I hope this was staged, and it may well have been. In any case, it gives us a glimpse of how selfish and dehumanizing the notion is that sex must always maximize one’s personal pleasure, but it must never have any consequences. No one has ever been able to remove the consequences from chocolate, and removing the consequences from sex is far more difficult.

I am well aware that some adults find this sort of thing entertaining, though I can’t imagine why. What bothers me is that there is no safe haven from it. I will need a haircut in a couple of weeks, and my kids will probably need haircuts too. There isn’t a barber shop anywhere where the entertainment isn’t vulgar. I went into a barber shop with my kids a couple of years ago, only to find that they had a TV on with a program featuring a woman who claimed that any of the nine men on the show might be the father of her baby. ,I suspect the people on the show were actors who were hired to be as crude as possible about an imaginary situation, but that didn’t make me more comfortable about the program. Of course, there is a time to fully inform children about sex, but it should be beyond grade school, at a point when an individual child is ready for the information. Until then, I don’t want my kids prematurely asking, “Daddy, what is the mattress mambo?” If the collective American culture has decided that my children have no right to be children anymore, I have no alternative except to become a nuisance to people who accept public pornography so casually.

Public decency is an extremely scarce commodity these days. We Americans can’t seem to get enough reality TV, reality radio, etc. What will this generation do when they’re confronted with another reality, the reality of hell? Yes, I know I’m supposed to hate the sin, but love the sinner, and I’m generally in favor of that. But sometimes sinners are so dedicated to their sins that they can hardly be separated. When the glory has departed. Can the consequences be far behind?

BLOOD IN THE WATER

I chose this ominous title in order to try to depict the plight of the current administration in Washington. There has been progress in Iraq, but it still remains to be seen whether the Iraqis are, or ever will be able to govern themselves in a way which respects the rights of everyone in Iraq and ends virtually all of the sectarian violence there, not to mention the violence directed against Americans and others who would presumably like to leave the country the instant things are stabilized. The twofold danger of a premature withdrawal from us is that either Iraq may become what Lebanon was in the 1970s and 1980s, or it may be effectively swallowed up by Iran. Neither of those things would be good for us, and they would be worse for the Iraqis. Even so, we Americans, including myself, are eager to get on with other pressing national business, and we have a lot of other things to concern ourselves with, regardless of the outcome in Iraq. We have more pressing issues with China, Mexico and Iran than we do with Iraq, though Iran is not unrelated. If I were the president, I would be very concerned about having 130,000 Americans nextdoor to a nuclear Iran. We all should remember what happened to the Marines in Lebanon in 1983.

President Bush has spoken publicly about the decision about when to leave Iraq being left up to another administration, which adds to the impression that we are stuck in the sand near Baghdad indefinitely. Correctly or incorrectly, I don’t think Americans are willing to be in Iraq indefinitely. I’m impatient with it myself. I believe some sort of plan or timetable needs to be in place for our exit, though I would prefer a results-specific plan to a date-specific plan. But the message has to be given to Iraqis that they had better be prepared to fend for themselves, sooner rather than later.

On other fronts, the Bush administration appears both winded and wounded. Tax cuts do help the economy, but tax cuts without fiscal responsibility (and we haven’t had any fiscal responsibility) are preparing us for an economic disaster somewhere down the road, probably when the Chinese and other foreigners get tired of financing our indebtedness. The president’s inability to find a veto pen for five and a half years is disturbing. I wish he would borrow Janet Nepolitano’s, so she would quit using hers. My theory about President Bush is that while he doesn’t mind going after foreign terrorists, he is much too nice to Americans, particularly American congressmen from both parties who would like to spend a lot of money in their own districts.

There are less than six months until the mid-term elections, and here is what is at stake. If Democrats regain both houses of Congress, which seems likely at the moment, articles of impeachment will be introduced early in 2007, certainly with regard to domestic surveillance and possibly with the war in Iraq. Of course, this will not be an attempt to put Dick Cheney in the White House. It will instead be the first attempt by an American political party to change the party of the presidency and to put someone of its own choosing in the White House, bypassing the electoral process by which we have always chosen both presidents and the ruling political party of the executive branch. The left has a plan for an unprecedented political coup.

Furthermore, they will not be content just to send President Bush quietly back to his Crawford ranch. They will have him indicted for crimes against the Democratic party, and they will do everything possible to harass this president with legal problems for the rest of his life. Imagine Laura Bush having to visit her husband in jail, and that is precisely what the left is lusting for.

The president really only has one card left in his deck. As long as he is still in office, he can make news of his own choosing. But it will be hard to do that in Iraq, unless he is willing to withdraw a substantial number of troops. It also seems unlikely that the present administration will suddenly become fiscally conservative enough to significantly reduce the federal deficit and re-energize the Republican base by doing so. The president could help himself considerably with most Americans by doing an about-face with regard to immigration, insisting on legal immigration and closing the borders. In fact, a war on terrorism with open borders is ridiculous. But the president is already retreated into a corner on this issue which is not helpful to the country or to himself. So what I expect is more of the same, and more of the same is likely to lead to a disaster, not only for this president, but for conservatives and conservative ideas.

It has not escaped my notice that the left has initiated a major witch hunt against every prominent conservative in the country, including every prominent official of the Bush administration, as well as Nute Gingrich, Tom Delay, Bill Frist, Rush Limbaugh, etc. Some of them may have contributed to their own undoing, but not even Jesus could be squeaky clean enough to avoid the wrath of the leftist press, Hollywood, or the leftist universities. As it stands now, it is reasonable to expect the 21st century version of the Salem witch trials to begin in earnest in January 2007. The point for the left is not just to go after individuals, but to frighten their opponents into hiding in a closet.

A MASSAGED MESSAGE

I was offered a job once with health insurance, life insurance, vision and dental coverage for my family, a 401-K, a company car and an on-site day care center. But there was no start date and no working hours, because they really didn’t care whether I showed up or not.

Actually, I’m just kidding, there is no such job for me or anyone else. But I do know a place where a similar (though equally unrealistic) offer exists. The benefits are wonderful, and the cost appears to be minimal, every Sunday morning at most local churches. In fact, I wish someone would take a dare and visit a different church every Sunday, until he or she finds one whose primary message one Sunday is about the possibility of hellfire and damnation for the unrepentant, the need for personal holiness, the consequences of sin, the necessity for Christians to die to self, the willingness to suffer for speaking the truth and doing what’s right, the need to pick up and carry one’s own cross, the necessity for self-control or spiritual discipline, etc. Sin hasn’t disappeared from the vocabulary of the church, but it has become such a secondary topic that I suspect someone who would take my dare might go to a different church Sunday after Sunday for quite a while. I think this is a fairly new phenomenon in America, something this nation has not seen in previous generations.

Many pastors these days don’t speak much about sin, suffering or sacrifice, because they believe they will only be preaching to the choir, the choir doesn’t need to repent, they’re the church’s most faithful members, after all, and they might get bored and leave if Sunday’s message focuses on unpleasant realities. But anyone who has read the first three chapters of Revelation knows that the choir also needs a good sermon now and then. The message of the church should be positive, but it should never be painless, and too often it is. What worries me about Christianity in America is not the release of movies like “The Da Vinci Code.” I’m much more concerned about what doesn’t go on inside our churches on Sundays, and sometimes I’m afraid there’s more concern about the attendance figures and the size of the offering than the need for a continuous attitude of repentance.

By the way, I don’t think I have ever known a pastor who really believes in a form of Christianity with maximum benefits, but very little personal cost. Every pastor I know is making personal sacrifices and paying a high price for being in the ministry. I would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the clergy who isn’t a decent, dedicated and sincere person. Yet it seems to me that they are afraid of their soft, spineless congregations, or at least, I can’t come up with any other reason for what I don’t hear on Sundays. Shouldn’t we occasionally hear something puritanical in the midst of a hedonistic culture, or has Christianity morphed into a series of motivational speeches, God’s Dale Carnegie course? It’s nice to hear that I’m OK and you’re OK, but sometimes I’m not OK, and it’s my own fault.

I’m not writing this about last Sunday’s sermon, or any specific sermon I’ve ever heard. It’s just a general observation that I’ve heard a lot of “feel good” messages, and what I read in scripture includes hundreds of admonitions and warnings against doing what’s wrong, and hundreds of exhortations to do what’s right.

Too often, during my years as a Christian, I have heard a powerful and moving sermon on Sunday which was mostly forgotten by Tuesday or Wednesday, replaced by another powerful and moving (but entirely unrelated) sermon the next Sunday. If I were a pastor, I would start most Sundays with a simple question, “How are you doing with what we discussed last week?” I’m as guilty of forgetting about last week as anyone else, but I don’t think it’s just my problem, and it sure would help to be reminded.

One Sunday years ago, when my wife and I lived in Colorado, we went to a church which held a telephone conference call with about a dozen missionary families around the world. After the service, we went to the pastor and asked him if we could adopt any one of those families, to stay in touch with them, to support them financially and to pray for them. We contacted and eventually met and became friends with the family who was recommended to us. We got more out of that Sunday than any other Sunday during the three years of our attendance at that church, because we used the service as a homework assignment, and we followed through on it. Maybe we should have done more with the other sermons there, but the point is that we did our best when the talk became our walk.

GRACIAS HERMANOS, PART 1

My family moved from the Lone Star state to the Land of Enchantment when I was five years old. Even growing up in New Mexico, I was never certain what we should call the Spanish-speaking people around us. When I was little, I called them Spanish people, referring to their language, not to the nation of Spain. The one thing I never called them was Mexicans, because most of them had been in the United States their whole lives, as I had, and I sometimes heard the term Mexican used in a dirogatory way. When I was in high school, the term chicano was in vogue, but I rarely hear it anymore. I never heard the term hispanic until the 1970s, but I’ll probably use it throughout these columns, instead of Latino, Mexican-American or the terms I’ve already mentioned, because the term hispanic is commonly used in the media. Having lived in or near the southwest for nearly all of my life, it astonishes me that I’m not sure what the most respectful term is, but I’ll use hispanic for now.

Anyway, after my family moved to New Mexico, we frequently drove to the mountains of northern New Mexico, often camping overnight in rural parts of the state where we were the minority and the locals were predominantly hispanic. I was about eight years old on one of our trips through the northern mountains. My alcoholic father was driving a little too fast for the local police. My father never said anything negative about minorities and he may not have had any prejudices, but he was not as humble as he should have been when the long arm of the law was a hispanic arm. He argued with the bilingual policeman who pulled him over, and the argument escalated until my foolish father pointed a gun at the officer. Generally speaking, pointing a weapon at a peace officer is one’s last act on earth. But this very kind officer noticed that my mother was also in the front seat, and there were four kids in the back seat, including me. So he told my father he would let him go, and no shots were fired.

But actually, he didn’t let my father go. He got back into his squad car and called for reinforcements, and a whole bunch of nice hispanic policemen met my father a little further down the road. Resistance was now useless, and my father was taken to jail. I actually have no memory of this incident, because I was asleep in the back seat. My timing is so poor that I completely missed one of the most dramatic incidents of my entire life, but I suppose this was a good incident to miss. All I can remember is riding back up there later so my mom could bail my dad out of jail. Had the first officer used his weapon, I might have died in my sleep, or more likely, I might have woken up, drenched in my father’s blood. As it was, we all survived the ordeal, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to a courageous and patient Spanish-speaking police officer whose name I have never known. This is the only way I can thank him.

GRACIAS HERMANOS, PART 2

Thursday, May 4, was the annual national day of prayer, and my wife volunteered to participate in one of the events in our community. Unfortunately, although she is generally very good with maps and directions, she was unable to find the location for the event she had volunteered for, and she returned home with a considerable degree of frustration.

The next evening we planned to go to a home group meeting sponsored by the church we attend, and it was being held several miles from us at an address she was unable to find. We were close to it, but unable to locate our destination. In a moment of impatience and anger, she drove her emotions by turning the car around and driving over a curb. Unfortunately, in doing so, she caused our right front tire to go flat, very flat and very quickly.

We live in a large metropolitan area, it was dark, and we were in an unfamiliar location, without a cell phone or any way to contact anyone we know. We didn’t even have a phone number for the place we were going to. To make matters worse, although we had a spare tire, I am blind, and I am the least mechanical person on earth. Knowing how to change a tire is one of the trillions of skills I don’t possess. We were stranded and unable to help ourselves.

When my wife got out to look at the tire, along came a very soft-spoken man with a Spanish accent. He just happened to have a jack, and he was able to put our spare tire on for us. Of course, we had to buy a new tire the next day, which cost us $92 we can scarcely afford. Our rescuer told me his name is Joseph, and that is all I know about him. It may very well be that he and his family have been American citizens for many generations. But I did wonder, while he was changing our tire, if he might be an illegal immigrant, doing a job this American can’t do.

On the one hand, even if I had 10,000 close hispanic friends, it would not change my belief that the United States must close its borders, and that we Americans need to do whatever we can to maintain our national sovereignty. On the other hand, no amount of irritation with Mexico or other Latin-American and South American nations and no inaction by our own government will make me forget that at critical times in my life, I have been blessed by members of the hispanic community. I deliberately forgot most of the Spanish I learned in high school, because I just can’t seem to make my r’s roll, and I always felt self-conscious about hearing myself trying to speak Spanish. So I am somewhat separated from the hispanic community by language and culture. But I have written this to acknowledge that I have also benefited from extraordinary acts of kindness and generosity which have been done by some of them, things I won’t be able to forget. Thank you Joseph.

THE INAPPROPRIATE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

I did not see the recent interview of Mary Cheney. In fact, I haven’t paid much attention to anything on TV since last summer’s hurricane coverage. But I have read that when she was in high school, Mary Cheney told her parents she is gay. According to her, Vice President Cheney’s response to her was, “We love you. You’re still our daughter. We just want you to be happy.” Instead of announcing her sexual preference for other women, I wonder how they would have responded if she had said something like this. “Mom and dad, I’ve been thinking about the opportunities available to young people these days. I have given a lot of thought to what would be the most fulfilling career for me, and I have chosen a life of crime. Don’t worry. I won’t do anything really dumb like robbing banks. Those people always get caught. I will be a smart criminal, the opportunities are endless, and I expect to be wealthy, without depending on you. Besides, I have always felt an inner defiance which I need to express. Since I was very small, I have felt that I am truly a criminal, trapped in a Cheney body. I know you’ll understand.”

If that conversation had taken place, I doubt the Cheneys would have responded with “We just want you to be happy.” If they did respond in the way she described when she told them about her sexual orientation, the Cheneys clearly don’t believe what I believe about homosexuality. But I don’t want to say anything else about homosexuality or the Cheneys here.

What really disturbs me about this is that too many Americans have an overly exaggerated view of the importance of happiness. Was anyone happy on the beaches of Normandy? Yet we refer to the young men we sent there as the greatest generation. If there was greatness in those young men, that greatness was shown by their courage and their willingness to be sent into the most dreadful circumstances men had ever seen. Don’t we really know that the pursuit of happiness can lead to adultery or divorce, just as easily as it leads to marriage? Did Jesus pursue happiness in the garden of Gethsemane, or when he fasted for forty days?

I don’t know how my own children will turn out. I hope they will experience much happiness during their lives. But when push comes to shove, I would rather have children who are great, but not happy, than to have children who are happy, but not great. I’m just as afraid of lions as anyone else, but I will personally volunteer for the lion’s den today, or any day, if there’s a good reason to go there. I’m frightened for a generation of Americans who only want happiness and pleasure. If possible, I want to be a faithful Christian, a great husband, a great father, a great friend, a great employee and a great citizen. Being happy in any of those roles is a bonus, but I expect to endure happiness and hardship in all of them.

I know many Americans are still reaching for greatness, not merely for happiness. I go to church with some of them and I read editorials by others who are clearly motivated by the highest of values. But I have also observed that Bill Cosby gets a lot of flack, and he has many opponents when he demands greatness from his own people. Yet I understand how imperative it feels to him to point out the obvious to this generation, and I know very well why he has to do it. For me, demanding excellence begins with two boys who fell asleep last night in the living room, and I’ll spend much of the rest of this day, and presumably many days to come, demanding excellence and virtue from them and trying to overcome their sometimes self-destructive pursuit of happiness.

ADVICE FOR A HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE

I have been asked by a friend to give some advice and encouragement to her daughter, who is about to graduate from high school. Because we moved out of the state where both the mother and daughter live, I have not really known this girl as a teenager, so I have to pass along generic advice. Since it’s generic, I’m also posting it here.

First of all, I am sorry I cannot attend your graduation, since I know it’s a memory you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life. More than that, I am sorry I do not know you well, and I have not been a big part of your life (or your mom’s) in recent years. Believe me, I remember the day you were born, and I had a different plan. But things are as they are, so I want to say some things here which I hope will contribute something positive to your future.

I can’t give any vocational advice, because although I will turn 53 this summer, I am still trying to figure out what I want to do when and if I ever grow up. So the advice I offer here has to do with the oldest and most enduring of all human institutions (not your high school), but marriage. I have no idea whether you think you want to get married someday, or whether you think you ever will. But most people do get married eventually, and I suspect you will too. I offer the following, not because I am an expert about marriage, but because I do know things about marriage now which I never would have guessed on the day 35 years ago when I graduated from high school.

Before I get to the heart of what I’ve learned about marriage, I want to say something in passing about the subject of sex. In 1953, the year I was born, a man named Hugh Hefner started a magazine called “Playboy”. The “Playboy” philosophy has always been, “Find them, fool them, fornicate with them, and forget them.” I actually cleaned that up a little. Hugh Hefner has always believed it is OK for people to use each other for sexual gratification. But using someone else for sex, or for any other selfish purpose, is as contrary to Christianity and the will of God as it was for Judas to sell Jesus to the Pharisees for thirty pieces of silver. I don’t want to say this too harshly, but you run the very real risk of becoming someone’s personal Judas if you have sex with them outside of marriage. I’m sure “Playboy” has never published an article about the sense of betrayal people feel after they are used and dumped. Let me balance that message by acknowledging that the great majority of Americans during the past two generations have engaged in at least one act of sexual infidelity, and God isn’t without mercy. If you make a mistake, apologize, confess, repent, and don’t do it again.

One more thing before I get off this subject. “Playboy” started a trend in the United States which ultimately has made pornography more accessible than groceries. I am convinced that at least 75% of men who attend Christian churches every Sunday are also deliberately viewing pornography from time to time during the week. I believe this, because I’ve asked guys questions and I’ve heard them talk to each other about this, and what I’ve heard among Christians is truly astonishing. You have a personal obligation as a Christian not to view pornography, and you have every right to insist on a marriage which is free from pornography’s influence. By the way, there is a wonderful column on this subject called “Get Over It” on http://www.townhall.com by a woman named Jennifer Roback Morse. If you take time to read it, the sincerity of what she says about this will absolutely leap off the page at you.

Now here’s what I really want to say about marriage. There is a portion of everyone’s life when God intends them to be single, and there is a portion of nearly everyone’s life when one is supposed to be married. Proverbs 18:22 says, “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.” That is true, but it is also unfortunate that my interpretation of this scripture when I was single was that I had not found a good thing and I had not obtained favor, and I had better get busy finding and obtaining. You know how frightened Christians are about being left behind. When I was single, I viewed myself as somewhat of a second-class citizen because I hadn’t yet found somebody. Actually, I found several somebodies before I got married, but that’s another subject for another time. I’ve also known a lot of married people (especially those who have gotten married right out of high school), who spend much of their lives wishing they were single. It is easy for both married and single people to believe the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. But the grass isn’t greener, it’s just a different lawn with a different kind of grass. I don’t wish I were still single, but I really do wish I had been happier when I was single. While you are single, appreciate it, because although it doesn’t offer the benefits of marriage, it is wonderful in its own way, as you will find out when you get married.

Getting married is somewhat like moving to a foreign country, whose language and culture you don’t know. It’s not a better country or a worse country, but the language and culture of marriage has almost nothing to do with anything single people know about. The truth about marriage is that marriage is the act of trading most of one’s autonomy, preferences and lifestyle for the opportunity to love and be with another person. When I was single, I thought the prospect of having someone to love was so compelling that no sacrifice would matter. It is compelling, I have a very good wife, I’m thrilled to be out of the unhappy business of pursuing women, and I don’t mind the sacrifices of marriage most of the time.

But the dominant thing I hear from my male friends is how little of their time is their own, how little control they have over how their money is spent, how they struggle for agreement with their spouse about disciplining their children, how they’ve lost their hobbies, how they don’t want to be with their in-laws or her friends, and how they miss their own family and friends. There’s a reason why ESPN shows highlights, and the reason is because no married man can watch a whole game. A lot of marriage is about doing the “honey do” list when you, the honey, least want to do it. Marriage is God’s way of ripping most of the selfishness right out of us, and that’s a good thing. But it isn’t painless, and it isn’t supposed to be.

I also want to say that marriage doesn’t just change your relationship with your spouse, it redefines your relationship with everyone. That can be a good thing. For instance, my wife likes to laugh, and I always know where she is when we’re separated in public, because I can hear her laughing across the room. The benefit of that for me is that people believe I have a sense of humor even if I don’t crack a joke or a smile for two years. I must have a sense of humor, or why would I be with her?

But it is also likely that not everyone will be happy with your choice of husbands, or that your husband’s family will not be happy with you. When we got engaged, my wife wanted me to fly up to Montana to meet her mother. I bought round-trip tickets for both of us, and she told her mother we were coming. But her mother didn’t approve of the marriage, and she deliberately ditched us and went to Florida the same weekend we were to go to Montana. Since we had nowhere to stay in Montana, we took half of our flight to Salt Lake City, because my wife has friends there, and we assumed we could catch the return part of our trip home. But the airline cancelled the remainder of our round trips when we didn’t go to Montana, and I had to buy additional one-way tickets home. After fifteen years of marriage, I have probably exceeded my mother-in-law’s pre-nuptual expectations and we get along reasonably well, but she never has apologized for her disapproval, and she never will.

Worse than that, my wife’s roommate accused my wife of being “too excited” about our wedding, she accused my wife of idolatry and claimed I was her idol. Yet I had to allow this woman to be the maid of honor in my wedding, I had to allow her to ride in the limousine with us, which we rented to take us to the hotel after the wedding reception, and I had to keep quiet about how I felt about it. She never apologized either, and that broad owes me big time for being gracious to her. When Frank Sinatra sang “I did it my way”, he sure as hell wasn’t singing about marriage. I haven’t done it my way for a long time. Even on my wedding day, I felt more like a leaf in a hurricane than a bridegroom. Hardly anything went the way I wanted it to. I don’t mean that I didn’t enjoy my wedding day. I did enjoy it, and I have good memories about it, but it wasn’t anything like what I had envisioned, hoped or planned for.

A few weeks before our wedding, I was having lunch with the pastor who was going to preside over our wedding, and my wife was not present. He asked me, “Where are you going on your honeymoon?” I explained to him that we had completely different ideas about that. Because I had never been to the Pacific northwest, I wanted to go to Seattle, but my wife wanted to go to Disney World in Florida. I had absolutely no interest in a personal meeting with Mickey Mouse on our honeymoon. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything sillier to do. So I explained that we had decided to compromise, and we were going to Tampa. He said, “I don’t know if this has occurred to you yet, but Tampa is a whole lot closer to Orlando than it is to Seattle. Get used to it buddy, because you’ll be compromising like that from now on.” In fact, Tampa is so much closer to Orlando than it is to Seattle that we drove to Orlando one day while we were in Florida. The honeymoon was fun, but we spent so much more money than I had wanted to spend that I referred to it as the moneymoon.

I’m not saying any of that as a complaint, but only to make the point that the benefits of marriage are obvious, but the costs of a negotiated life would astonish most single people. Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. My wife is a very nice lady, I love her, I’m fortunate to have her, and I believe the little family I now head is a far closer family than the one I grew up in. We have two wonderful sons, who we love dearly. If they weren’t my kids, they would still be my favorite boys on earth. But we constantly warn their teachers and babysitters that each of our wonderful boys has a unique and rare gift for being a royal pain in the posterior. I never really understood the concept of grace until I had children. They are really delightful boys, I love watching them learn and grow, I love them dearly, but I often disapprove of their behavior, and I struggle every day to get them to be real sons who adopt their father’s ways without losing their individuality. So in addition to warning you about the price of marriage, I must also warn you that having children is like getting married, only more so, and it makes your marriage both better and worse. Pay the price, it’s worth the sacrifices, but don’t be uninformed about marriage.

I can’t believe how ridiculously naive I was. I thought marriage was something I could sort of add on to my bachelor lifestyle, not something I was exchanging it for. Worse yet, my ignorance was partly my fault. I wouldn’t have listened to married people who had problems, because I would have said, “I won’t make the same mistakes this person has made.” My advice is to listen to people who are married, find out what’s good and bad about it, and please, be more humble than I was.

Be aware that every marriage has good times and bad times. Often, that’s because of external circumstances, not necessarily due to problems or conflicts in the relationship. But conflicts do exist within every marriage. My wife and I have sometimes been at odds about what church to attend. Marriage is frequently about not getting one’s way, and being OK with it for the sake of maintaining the marriage. But worse than that are deep-seated conflicts where neither spouse is willing to budge an inch. Sooner or later, most marriages hit that wall about something. What should a couple do when their differences appear to be irreconcilable? The easy, but very wrong answer is to find a divorce lawyer, sign a few papers and send your spouse packing. But the right thing to do is to continue to love your spouse, even on the darkest days of conflict, and wait patiently for a solution. It is true that no one can take both forks in the road. Generally, the best thing to do is to wait until both of you are in agreement. It may be hard to believe at times, but even differences we think are irreconcilable actually resolve themselves over time. A successful marriage requires a lot of love and a lot of patience. Don’t bail out when times are tough. If you do get married, no matter how much you love your husband, a day will come when you are tempted to file for a divorce. But very few divorces are truly necessary, and very few divorces make anyone better off. I once heard Paul Harvey say, “The greatest love I’ve ever seen on earth is an old man’s love for his old wife.” That doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens because they hung in there and stayed together during painful and sorrowful times.

I want to close with one final personal experience. During the summer when I turned 19, I visited the family of a young lady I was going to college with. At one point when I was there, her parents sat on the couch, hugging and kissing each other. My friend was understandably embarrassed, and she asked her parents to stop. Normally I think it’s quite improper to be necking in front of other people. But it occurred to me that my parents had split up ten years earlier, and even the middle-aged couples I knew who were still together seemed to be living in different worlds, tolerating, but not really loving each other. So I said to her, “Please don’t make them stop. You don’t realize how fortunate you are to have parents who still love each other.” The love you express toward your spouse is one of the greatest gifts you can ever give your children, and by the way, it will really, really, really impress their friends!

MY SECRET TRIVIAL WISH

In spite of Social Security, bank accounts and other customer numbers which are assigned to us, or the fingerprints, DNA and dental records which law enforcement uses to identify us, we are all known primarily by our name, our voice and our face. We would all be quite confused if we sometimes encountered someone with the same name and voice, but a different face, or the same name and face, but a different voice.

Since I am blind, I identify people primarily by their voices. When I was a child, women would sometimes ask me if I wanted to feel their faces. Usually, this request came from women who were complete strangers to me. I felt their faces just to be polite, but I really thought it was pretty silly, first of all, because it’s impractical to feel everyone’s face when they enter a room, and also because feeling someone’s face can’t be nearly as reliable in terms of identification as seeing their face. No man ever asked me to feel his face. Somehow it just wasn’t a manly thing to do, or maybe men didn’t want me to realize that their morning shaves were wearing off.

Anyway, I viewed the practice of face feeling with some private disdain. But now that I’m over 50, it occurs to me that no one has asked me to feel their face since I became an adult, and I’m not familiar with anyone’s else’s face anymore, except for my wife’s and my two sons. Unfortunately, I suspect that women haven’t asked me to feel their faces for decades now, because they’re afraid I might also take the opportunity to feel their breasts or something even more personal. Now I realize that even though feeling someone’s face is ridiculously useless, it is also a privelege.

So here is my secret wish. I hope someday before I die, a woman who hasn’t read this will ask me to feel her face. Since I’m married, I have no real reason to prefer feeling a woman’s face to a man’s, but it is a chick thing, and I wouldn’t expect this request from a man who isn’t gay. I’ve already explained why feeling someone’s face isn’t useful in terms of identification, and it’s really not a big thrill to discover that everyone has a nose, two lips, two cheeks and a mouth. But I understand now that feeling someone’s face is a sign that they trust me not to take advantage of them. Being trusted is more valuable than sex, or at least, it’s more valuable than any sexual experience with someone whose trust I haven’t earned. Having someone’s confidence, in any sort of relationship, is the greatest honor of all.

ANOTHER GIFT FROM THE CLINTONS

Why would anyone object to the Bill Clinton Foundation’s successful efforts to get soft drink vendors to “voluntarily” decide not to sell their products in the nation’s public schools, an effort they hope will also extend to most parochial and private schools? After all, our kids are getting too fat, and we shouldn’t raise them on doughnuts and Pepsi anyway. I know I should regard this as a positive step, for the betterment of us all. So why is it that this bothers me?

First of all, no one “voluntarily” stops selling a legal product to anyone. They only “volunteer” if they are being threatened by lawyers, and they decide that “volunteering” not to sell their products is less harmful to their interests than a long and protracted legal struggle which they might lose. Surely, soft drink manufacturers don’t want to be saddled with the sort of expenses which have been levied against the tobacco companies, and they know the relentlessly radical food police have a plan to make them go bankrupt if they don’t “volunteer” to toe the politically correct party line. It shouldn’t bother us that well into his presidency, Bill Clinton never passed a McDonalds without stopping, because our former president has had heart bypass surgery and he has seen the light now, and he knows it’s best for our children (and the rest of us) not to follow his example, but his new enlightened vision for our future. The AP stories about this just glow with our big brother Bill’s compassion for us. The so-called journalists of our era apparently haven’t asked any questions about how many threats were made, or how much arm-twisting took place to help the people at Coke, Pepsi and Canada Dry get Bill’s vision for a brighter and healthier tomorrow. I should just be happy and shut up, because this is good for my kids.

Of course, if my fourth grader wants to have a martini for lunch at school, I think society should say no. In fact, if his school individually chooses not to have vending machines with soft drinks in them, that’s fine with me. But if he wants to have a rootbeer for lunch, and a rootbeer is available, I support his freedom to have it. I’m fully aware rootbeer won’t help him live longer than Methuselah, and it may even remind me that he is a mortal human being, like the rest of us. Don’t bore me with the lack of nutritional value of soft drinks, I know all about it. I certainly support dietary restrictions for children which are made by their parents, but I’m much less comfortable with the same restrictions when they’re imposed by the government, foundations who’ve been elected by no one, or lawyers looking for a quick monetary thrill.

What bothers me about this is that we used to live in a free country, and we shouldn’t give up our freedoms lightly. Will the food police stop with this modest victory? I don’t think so. On the contrary, I think we should all duck, because they’re going to find another target. I work in an office building with a lot of overweight people, whose arteries are probably as hard as diamonds and whose weight will probably subtract years from their lives. I don’t see any reason why the food police should allow adults to have soft drinks if our children can’t. The food police won’t stop with soft drinks, cheeseburgers and pizza, they won’t be content until our bread can no longer be buttered, and our meat (if we’re allowed to have any meat) can no longer be marinated. We won’t live in a land of milk and honey anymore, because milk and honey are bad for us.

Bill Clinton has a dream, a dream that someday we will all have a government breakfast, followed by a government lunch, followed by a government supper, each fulfilling our needs for the government’s recommended daily allowance of everything, a world in which candle sales are down because none of us are allowed to have a slice of anyone’s birthday cake anymore. That dream may sound good to him, but I don’t want any part of it.

I’m having spaghetti for lunch today. It’s not that great for me, but I’ll enjoy it. Some time today, I’m also going to buy a Coke, not because it has the least bit of nutritional value, but because I’m still a free American, and because, for better or worse, Coke has been marketed more successfully than buttermilk, and I hate buttermilk. Bill Clinton hasn’t taken my freedom away yet, but I trust him to keep trying.

By the way, I wonder just in passing who these food police are. I suspect they’re the same people who are passing out condoms to our sons in schools and birth control pills to our daughters. The very people who keep telling us that our children can’t be expected to exercise self-control sexually, and therefore, kids must be supplied with Planned Parenthood’s birth control and abortions, because kids just can’t help themselves, those same people long to snatch every Snickers before it reaches their teeth and don’t even want them to have a choice about what to eat or drink at school. Yes, the same people who are pro-choice about murdering unborn babies cringe when they see potato chips. They’re not pro-choice, they’re anti-abstenance. They’ve figured out to profit from sex, but not from abstenance. Patrick Henry isn’t just rolling over in his grave today, he’s crying big tears, tears for a nation which encourages its children to have sex, but never a Seven-up.

I want to add one final note for the theologically inclined among us. In the Bible, first Timothy chapter 4, verses 1 through 5 read:

“1BUT THE [Holy] Spirit distinctly and expressly declares that in latter times some will turn away from the faith, giving attention to deluding and seducing spirits and doctrines that demons teach,

2Through the hypocrisy and pretensions of liars whose consciences are seared (cauterized),

3Who forbid people to marry and [teach them] to abstain from [certain kinds of] foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and have [an increasingly clear] knowledge of the truth.

4For everything God has created is good, and nothing is to be thrown away or refused if it is received with thanksgiving.

5For it is hallowed and consecrated by the Word of God and by prayer.”

This passage was written nearly 2,000 years ago, but it’s today’s news.

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN FIVE WORDS

I opened up the Bible to chapter 14 of the book of Acts Monday morning, and I learned something which will probably stick with me for the rest of my life. I’m not going to quote any of it here, since anyone who is interested can read it for themselves. But I do want to say something about what it means.

In this chapter, Paul, accompanied by Barnabas, went to a place called Iconium and spoke in the local synagogue about Jesus, eventually being heard by both Jews and Gentiles. Some of the people believed in Jesus, and some did not. The Lord confirmed the gospel by causing signs and wonders to accompany the proclamation of the word. However, that did not lead their opponents to repentance; instead, they tried to stone Paul and Barnabas, who left Iconium and went on to Lystra and Derbe, where this same cycle essentially repeated itself. At Lystra, a crippled man was healed and Paul actually was stoned, though he survived.

This chapter is not one of the most well-known chapters in the New Testament, or even in the book of Acts itself. But as I read it Monday, I realized this cycle is repeated many times throughout the New Testament in the lives of Jesus and his disciples, and even Old Testament writers wouldn’t have been very surprised by any of it.

The five parts of the cycle of Christianity are proclamation, faith, opposition, confirmation and persecution. The difference between opposition and persecution is that opposition is verbal and persecution is violent. When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead in John chapter 11, common sense might lead one to suppose that the Pharisees would repent, apologize to Jesus, and put him in charge of their lives. But they did not do that. Scripture tells us that their response was that they wanted to kill Jesus and Lazarus too. Unless someone turns to Christ, their opposition always ultimately results in this sort of fury.

However, the confirmation aspect of Christianity (signs, wonders and miracles which God performs and no one is able to deny) is proof positive of the divinity of Christ and the ultimate triumph of his disciples. Without God’s confirmation, Jesus is ultimately no more significant than Confucius, Socrates or even Dr. Phil. At the end of the sermon on the mount, we are told that “He spoke az one who had authority, and not as their scribes.” Christ’s authority was demonstrated by both the manner in which he spoke and the miracles he performed.

Fast forward from the first century to 2006, and what do we see? Christianity has been spoken against in every generation, and that’s nothing new. But the volume of the opposition (at least in the United States) has never been louder than it is right now. A few weeks ago, oceanographers from Florida State University claimed that Jesus may have walked on ice, instead of water. It was only two days later when articles began appearing about the “gospel of Judas”, and the “Da Vinci Code” movie will be released soon.

So what should we expect next? I haven’t had any dreams or seen any visions about it, and I claim no prophetic gifts, but based on the historic model of proclamation, faith, opposition, confirmation and persecution, we should expect both confirmation and persecution in the near future. My sense of history tells me we are about to re-enter a time of miracles like the ones described in the Bible. Don’t expect to see them on TV, but look for them around you, not the sort of miracles which seem like they might just be good luck or miracles someone might have produced with a positive mental attitude, but the sort of miracles which point to the deity of Jesus and the truth of scripture. Christians who think the age of miracles has passed will be perplexed and amazed.

On the other hand, I believe Christians will soon be violently persecuted in ways which are particularly unprecedented in the United States. The recent church burnings in Alabama were done under the cover of darkness when the churches were empty. Don’t be surprised if churches are soon attacked in daylight when they’re full, and the authorities will ignore it, in some cases. My only concern about this prediction is that many American Christians have heard nothing but a “feel good” self-actualizing gospel for a generation, and they’ve heard very little about paying the price for being a Christian. Suffering for their faith was clearly the expectation of Christians in generations past, and it was a realistic expectation. If anyone has read this far and thinks I’m crazy, all I ask them to do is be patient and keep their eyes open.

NEIL YOUNG’S BITTER HARVEST

In 1972, at the height of his career, Neil Young recorded an album called “Harvest”, which included his most successful single, “Heart of Gold”. Now, after doing nothing anyone has noticed for many years, he has descended to the depths of his career, thanks to a “heart of rubbish”. The “Harvest” album was actually pretty good, if one can ignore the despondent lyrics and Neil’s whiney campfire girl voice. The “Harvest” album had good melodies, and I actually do like a lot of it. Now he has recorded a new album, which I think should be called “Bitter Harvest”. It is apparently a collection of anti-war Bush-bashing material, which specifically calls for the impeachment of President Bush–certainly no surprise and no change of direction from someone who sang “Four Dead in Ohio” with Crosby, Stills and Nash after the Kent State tragedy. I have not heard the new album, and I’ll do my very best to avoid it. So what follows is my review of the album’s concept, not the album.

To be fair, I have my own misgivings about the war in Iraq, and like anyone else, Neil Young is entitled to be opposed to the war, if he so chooses. But I object to the album for the following three reasons, and I’ll list them, beginning with the least important.

First of all, it’s my understanding that Neil Young is a Canadian. I don’t know where he resides, and I don’t know if he has dual Canadian-American citizenship. But I pretty much let Canadians run their own affairs, whether they do it well or poorly. I’ve known Canadians who are extraordinarily nice people, and I’ve known Canadians who are some of the world’s biggest jerks, and since I don’t know Neil Young, I can’t put him in any category, but criticizing the foreign policy of foreigners isn’t my bag, unless their foreign policy affects these United States.

More importantly, what Neil Young has done with this album is hardly novel or courageous. I’m convinced more celebrities have slammed George W. Bush than criticized Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin combined. Those who think George Bush and Adolph Hitler are morally equivalent apparently know very little about Hitler, and I suggest they find something out about what Hitler did to the brown shirts who put him into power (he had about a million and a half of them murdered, and George Bush hasn’t done that to Republicans, or even Democrats), the promises Hitler broke to many nations he promised not to invade, his deep racism, his final solution, which is unparalleled in all of human history, his mistreatment of his own military, his scorched earth policy toward Germany, and too many other human cruelties for me to specify here. Whatever anyone’s judgment or beliefs about George W. Bush, comparing him with Hitler is both ignorant and inexcusable.

Anyway, my point is that many, many celebrities have piled onto President Bush, so many that even liberals ought to be pretty bored with it by now. We’ve reached the point now that it’s about as cowardly and shameful as kicking the neighbor’s cat. Worse yet, the people in Hollywood are doing things like this because they think it’s a good career move. For instance, until he went on a Bush-bashing binge, no one had heard much from Harry Belafonte for nearly fifty years, and I’m convinced that many of these people are motivated primarily by the opportunity to see their names in print again. Bush-bashing has become the salve for the sagging ego, a cottage industry for those whose fame is disintegrating.

Finally, I get to what really irks me most about today’s creepy Hollywood types. I don’t mind that they want a more peaceful world; so do we all. I don’t mind if every spineless sissy in Hollywood is a pacifist, but I do hate their intellectual dishonesty, in that they never acknowledge the nature of our enemies. For example, the people who protested our involvement in Vietnam for a decade never said a word when the Pol Pot regime murdered approximately three and a half million Cambodians after we left southeast Asia, a far greater tragedy for the people of Cambodia than we either suffered or inflicted on others during the Vietnam war era. Neil Young and his buddies never said anything about it. Perhaps they were too stoned to notice. I used to know one of the Vietnamese boat people, a guy who risked his life to leave Vietnam four years after we left. Most of the people on his boat did not survive. Liberals don’t like to talk very much about the endless stream of refugees from places where Americans have vanished. When we pull out of Iraq, which we will have to do eventually, the resulting carnage is likely to be far uglier and bloodier than an American victory would have been. Of course, we can be accurately accused of destabilizing Iraq, but Iraq was being ruled by a man whose misdeeds could fill the Library of Congress. The truth is that the greatest cruelties mankind has experienced recently have occurred in those places where there has been no American influence, as in Rwanda in the 1990s.

What really bothers me about the Hollywood types is their intentional blindness to the entire landscape of what’s going on around us. I’m sure Neil Young worked hard on his anti-Bush material. But he hasn’t written a word in defense of the people who jumped out of the top floors of the World Trade Center, nor has he shed a musical tear for the victims of dozens of other terrorist attacks, from the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 to the Munich olympics of 1972, all the way to yesterday’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Has it ever occurred to Neil Young that before she was released recently, Jill Carroll may have been raped a hundred times? We know for sure that she faced machine guns and was threatened constantly, wondering for nearly three months whether each breath would be her last. Has he spent a moment being angry or writing a song on behalf of the other hostages who haven’t been so lucky, civilians who have had knives plunged into their throats? Of course, I’m not saying that Neil Young stood in his living room applauding when the World Trade Center collapsed; I assume he didn’t do that. But my point is that he didn’t make an album for the victims of that tragedy, or any public gesture of compassion for the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, he never gathered his Hollywood friends together to try to find a way to help the American hostages in Iran, etc. Neil Young has allowed ten thousand injustices to pass by him without comment. The only thing which fires his rockets is the hope that George Bush will be impeached. This needs to be seen for what it is, the stubborn determination of people who failed to unseat the president at the proper time in 2004 to get their way by some other process. “Power to the people” has vanished from the mouths of leftists, because the people haven’t cooperated with their views on abortion, homosexual marriage, pornography, and a host of other issues. Some other way must be found to impose their will on the rest of us.

Until Neil Young can cry real tears for the victims of terrorism, write songs and publicly condemn these barbaric acts, until he hates the terrorists more than he hates George W. Bush, he’s just another Hollywood has-been, whose so-called entertainment belongs in the trash. “A southern man don’t need him around”, and neither do I.

WHY I DON’T TEACH SCHOOL OR PRACTICE LAW

I have given thought to both the teaching and the legal professions at times during my life, because excellence in both of those professions mrequires good language skills and a desire to serve others. Unfortunately, this week I have encountered an unhappy intersection of the two professions which makes both seem distasteful.

My oldest son is currently in fourth grade in a local charter school, where Aims tests are to be given next week. Yesterday was the last day of class before the tests. My son says yesterday morning seemed like a normal morning until his teacher was called out of the classroom. His class assumed she had to answer a phone call. However, she was very upset when she returned. In my son’s words, “She was crying her eyes out, I saw her makeup coming off.” She gathered a few personal possessions and left the room again. The kids thought she had a family emergency or someone in her family had died suddenly, but that’s not what happened.

Some time later, two school officials came into the classroom and announced that she would no longer be their teacher, and they gave each student a letter to take home to their parents. The letter stated the teacher had been terminated due to an incident which did not affect our child directly, the school was legally unable to disclose the nature of the incident, and arrangements were being made to complete the school year in a satisfactory manner. I read things almost every day about teacher misconduct, and the details are usually almost unimaginably lurid. So many parents may have imagined something quite scandalous after reading that letter. Certainly there are areas of misconduct which might necessitate a teacher’s immediate dismissal. But the letter was so vague that I could guess anything from not turning in grades on time to the teacher molesting a student.

Though I can’t get anyone at the school to explain what caused the dismissal, I have learned from a school official that the inappropriate incident occurred the previous afternoon, and the teacher’s termination was the result of a complaint by one student’s parents. I can’t say much of anything about this with certainty, I know the teacher just well enough to suspect she wouldn’t do anything inappropriate without some significant cause or provocation, though she has had a difficult year with her own personal health issues, and she has seemed a bit weary of teaching to me at times. The rumor my son heard was that she may have struck or pushed a student after that student had a fistfight with another student. But that’s just a fourth grade rumor, and I don’t know how credible it is. The fourth grade rumors I heard when I was in fourth grade were pretty far-fetched. In any event, the short time between the incident and the dismissal and the fact that it only involved one student caused me to ask a school official the following questions.

“Since this incident only involved one student, couldn’t that student have been moved to another teacher’s fourth grade class for the remaining six weeks of the school year, causing minimal disruption to my son’s class and allowing my son’s teacher to search for other employment next fall if this school did not wish to retain her services?” I was told the incident was too serious for that.

The next thing I said was, “My son came home yesterday with a long list of fourth graders who cried because of what took place in their classroom yesterday, including himself. If this teacher really needed to be terminated, shouldn’t it have been done at the end of the day, so as to minimize the emotional distress to her class?” I was told the decision to dismiss her immediately was made, based on the advice of legal counsel, and that the school risked losing its insurance if it did not follow legal counsel.

My next question was, “Given the short time between the incident and the dismissal, was your lawyer concerned about fairness and justice to all of the parties involved and hearing everyone’s side regarding whatever happened?” The answer I got was, “You have to trust me on this one.”

Therein lies the problem. Even trusting God requires some facts to accept by faith. Otherwise, the Bible would be a one-page flyer. In this case, I don’t have any facts, and I trust any process which is exposed to sunlight more than I trust a process which is shrouded in secrecy. I can’t possibly have confidence in the school’s decision, based on the short timeframe between the incident and the dismissal, and I really can’t have confidence about feeling compassion for the teacher either, though I’m leaning in that direction. All I’ve got are fourth grade rumors and a vision of my son and other fourth graders crying in class. This is what the constant fear of lawsuits has done to all of us.

When I was growing up and there was a conflict between an adult and a child, society assumed the adult was correct and the child needed to be corrected. Sometimes that wasn’t the case then, and sometimes it isn’t the case now. But it seems like it’s probably a more accurate starting place than today’s assumption that children are correct and adults are bullies. I remember when children were paddled at school. But now teachers have classrooms full of children with conflicting personalities, and teachers have very few options for dealing with them. That contributes a great deal to our increasingly poor educational system, and it drives good teachers out of the profession. 50% of all teachers leave the profession within five years or less, and that’s a very high turnover rate for a profession in which many teachers have advanced degrees, and most have to get through a state certification process. Even if my son’s teacher over-reacted, if this incident was the result of a child’s misbehavior, the child will learn nothing, except to raise hell and despise anyone who is in a position of authority.

Finally, though I don’t have enough information tu justify being on her side, I empathize with my son’s teacher, because I know what it’s like to be called into an office without any prior warning, being told one’s services are no longer needed and being asked to leave the building. That has happened to me three times. I never cried, perhaps because it would have been too embarrassing, or perhaps because I didn’t want to give the people who terminated me an even greater victory. But I’ll never forget what painful days those were.

I suspect the teacher really did something wrong, but I doubt if handling it this way was really necessary. Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” But these days, everyone wants to be a lawyer, and no one wants to be a peacemaker. We have institutionalized the creation and adjudication of as much conflict as possible, though scripture says to seek peace and pursue it. Malice for all and charity toward none seems to be the driving principle behind our media, our political system, our educational system and our overburdened judicial system. On judgment day, we’ll probably see a lot of people’s makeup coming off.

ps. Since I originally posted this, I have spoken to my son’s former teacher. She acknowledged there was a mild altercation between her and a student where she “flicked” the student away from her desk in an effort to get him to go back to his desk and sit down. I asked her specifically whether what she did injured the child or left any bruises or marks on him, and she claims the child was not injured in any way. She also said that when she was fired, she asked if the student’s parents knew she was being fired, and she was told, “They don’t need to know.” Of course, I’m still not a witness to anything, and I haven’t heard both sides of the story, and it’s not my job to be a private investigator anyway. But my impression is that school officials are paranoid about the possibility of lawsuits, even when none are threatened, and that there has been an ongoing conflict between the teacher and a couple of school officials, which caused them to be relatively eager to dismiss her. My only point here is that I would have hoped everyone would have pursued a fair and just outcome for all. I’m not exactly in the habit of quoting Rodney King, but “can’t we all just get along?”

DUELING REALITIES

I was reading through the book of Judges in the Bible a couple of weeks ago, when I came to the story about Gideon. I’ve read it many times, so nothing about it was really new to me. Yet I was still quite struck by something about the story, as I re-read it. Under God’s direction, Gideon went into a battle with three hundred soldiers, who, as it turns out, were facing at least 135,000 soldiers. Furthermore, his 300 soldiers each went into battle with trumpets in their right hands and vases with torches in them in their left hands. Therefore, it was impossible for them to use swords. This is not the sort of battle plan they dream up at the Pentagon. In fact, it reminds me of Texans at the Alamo. To get a clearer picture of this, divide the numbers by 100, and try to imagine three unarmed men whose mission is to kill 1,350 armed men, then imagine that supernatural force intervenes on their behalf and they actually get the job done, which is what the scriptures claim happened. “In God we trust” may be on our money, but we Americans don’t practice it very often. With the possible exception of the last battle in the book of Judges, which was the third and only successful part of a civil war, every battle in the Old Testament was won by smaller armies with inferior weapons. If one accepts scripture, stories like the one about Gideon tell us something about life which goes far beyond issues like cifil defense and military preparedness.

That sort of story is dismissed by most people as a fable–so much so that there is currently an Associated Press story on the internet which claims that Jesus probably walked on ice instead of on water. I find the walking on ice story both amusing and disgusting, because it comes from the same AP which refuses to publish the Danish cartoons about Islam, yet it gleefully produces anti-Christian stories every day, and never even bothers to thank Christians for not rioting and murdering other Christians and infidels indiscriminately.

I believe both the Old and New Testament scriptures, yet I still find myself asking whether I really fully grasp the implications of such faith. On one hand, I believe the teaching that “with God, all things are possible.” Yet I am also very aware of the other reality I live in, a reality complete with financial problems, my wife’s serious health problems, problems with our children, an unfulfilling career which is going nowhere and doesn’t adequately support my family, no close friends, a seemingly endless supply of potential enemies, and there are even a lot of things about organized religion which I would love to do without, though I stubbornly attend church nearly every Sunday. My wife and I have often discussed how, particularly during the past five years, “for better or worse” has been worse, “for richer or poorer” has made us poorer, and “in sickness and in health” must mean sickness, because she has a lung illness called sarcoidosis (an inexplicable scarring of the lungs) which makes it difficult for her to breathe. Yet our marriage is intact, and we get along better year after year. I feel overwhelmed by challenges I don’t know how to overcome or even to deal with, yet I don’t feel discouraged, I can’t even remember what depression or loneliness used to feel like, and I think this is the way life as a Christian is supposed to be. I feel confident about the future, even though I can’t find a shred of evidence from today which should give me confidence. Maybe I’ve lost my marbles under the piano I wish I owned, but life is good, and it’s going to get better. Life is not good because of our present circumstances, but because the Author of life is wonderful, and he has the power to make life better. I’m ready to walk on water. May I start now?

DEFIANCE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

The other day I was listening to a news broadcast, which included comments from a professor at Arizona State University regarding the pro-illegal immigration protests which are currently taking place, primarily in the states bordering Mexico. He was saying that the pro-immigration rallies are generating a sort of political activism he hasn’t seen since the 1960s. Obviously, he defines activism as any political activity which supports liberal, no excuse me, progressive causes. Any political activity which does not advance the views of those who are politically left of center is reactionary and backward. I don’t think the word activist really carries any connotation about what an activist should advocate, but for the moment, I’ll take his word for it.

I lived through the 1960s too, and here’s what the 1960s taught me. My most enduring image of those days is of teenagers going to concerts where they could and did smoke marijuana and hashish, and experimented with other drugs, right in front of the police, because there were simply too many of them for the police to enforce the laws regarding substance abuse. Aside from the fact that there are no personal or societal benefits to recreational drug use, they ignored the fact that promoting a lawless culture will eventually deprive all of us, including them, not only the direct protection of the law, but the indirect protection afforded by the consciences of those who choose or feel compelled to obey the law. It was a time when many members of my generation decided to despise authority and to stick their fingers in the eyes of the cops, excuse me, they were called pigs at the time. Beneath the insecurity and the ethnic pride on both sides of the dispute about how many Mexicans and other foreigners should be allowed to come to or stay in the United States is that same spirit of defiance.

When I was in high school, our campus was closed, and both the school and our parents expected us to be on the schoolgrounds from the beginning of the school day until the end of it. One day a debate erupted in class between a minority who understood why parents felt safer with their kids in school during the day and why the school didn’t want to risk the liability of missing students, and the majority who did not understand why the school couldn’t give them credit for being mature enough to be able to come and go as they pleased. After listening to the discussion for a while, it occurred to me that if the school closed the cafeteria and insisted that everyone leave during the lunch hour, the same students who complained about the campus being closed would complain about the lunches they were no longer being provided, and they would argue the school didn’t care about their safety. Of course, it also follows that students who were content with the campus being closed would probably also be the ones who would most readily accept the status quo, if they were forced to leave the school during the day. My point is that the “finger in the eye” people are quite pathological about their personal acts of defiance, and the rationalizations and excuses for their defiance are generally quite secondary. Whenever anyone says, “This is moral, and this is not.”, “This is legal, and this is illegal.”, or “These are the rules, and this is against the rules.”, the finger in the eye crowd can hardly wait to act out their defiance, even if the rules, the laws and the moral precepts are explicitly for their benefit.

There is an ongoing debate in this country between social conservatives, including myself, who advocate personal morality, self-reliance and the rule of law, and liberals who advocate social justice above all other principles. Loosely defined, social justice takes something from the haves and gives it to the have nots. There are certainly times when social justice is appropriate, when the benefit for the have nots is far greater than the cost to the haves. When an employer allows an employee to leave work for the day to care for a sick child, they are making a decision that the benefit to the child of having a parent’s care during a time of illness is so great that it supercedes the necessity for getting the day’s work done, and that sort of social justice I support, and it’s almost universally supported by conservatives.

Similarly, it might be argued that hiring preferences for qualified disabled workers are acceptable, even though they may deprive someone who is not disabled from having the job instead, because by reason of the disability, the disabled person may only be able to do one job in ten thousand, whereas the person without the disability may be able to do one job out of every ten, and therefore is less harmed by reverse discrimination than the disabled job applicant is benefited. Many conservatives don’t support affirmative action under any circumstances, but I believe it may be appropriate in some exceptional situations.

But generally speaking, liberals seem quite unconcerned about those whose rights are sacrificed by their view of social justice. In the case of abortion, the mother’s “right to choose” not only deprives the father of any legal standing, but it destroys the lives of the unborn, who are far more affected by an abortion even than their mothers are.

In the case of the current immigration debate, liberals are not only unwilling to consider the existing immigration laws, but they are also unwilling to assess the social costs to the rest of us of uncontrolled borders. These social costs include a heightened chance for major terrorist attacks, an increased number of unskilled and uneducated workers, lower wages, higher crime rates, particularly with regard to crimes associated with the illegal drug trade, risks to the lives and health of illegals who are brought to the U.S. by unscrupulous immigrant smugglers, more disease, including tuberculosis, hepatitis and diabetes, more people who have no insurance of any kind, less loyalty to the United States, because we now see the Mexican flag flying above the American flag, if the latter is still present at all, and less adherence to the legal system in general. But none of these consequences seem to bother the dispensers of social justice, partly because they believe their generosity to their preferred groups is justified, but also because it allows them to stick their fingers in the eyes of people they don’t like much anyway.

Let me quote a conversation I heard between two government workers yesterday, regarding an upcoming protest march in favor of illegal immigration. The marchers plan to march to the state capitol, so one of the employees said that some conservative members of the state legislature have asked the governor to call out the national guard to provide extra security for the legislature. The governor is unlikely to grant that request, though it seems reasonable to me, since the legislators are the duely elected representatives of the public, and both their personal safety and their ability to conduct the state’s business would seem to be a public good.

But listen to the response of these two people to this request. The first said (regarding the safety of the legislature), “Screw them.” The second person said, “I think the protesters should be allowed to drag the legislators out into the streets and do whatever they want to do with them.” I assume that even murder is included in “whatever they want to do”. Clearly the left believes controversial public issues should be resolved in the streets, and mob violence is preferable to the democratic process. Beware of social justice. It may rip you off, and it might get you killed.

CULTURE WAR HEROES

In my previous post, I talked about the obsession with and overglorification of the rich and famous. But now I want to say something which, on the surface, seems almost contradictory, though I don’t think it really is. I believe we should all be looking for people among our acquaintances, and even people we don’t know, who can serve us well as mentors, role models, inspirations or just good examples.

I know a woman who works for a state legislator, and she also happens to be a pastor’s wife. The legislator she works for has beliefs and values similar to those she shares with her husband, which gives her life an unusual congruence, because her job during the week is supposed to have the same sort of influence on others her private life has. Every time I see her, I am reminded of my own wish that my life would work constantly for the same goals, goals which for me tend to get lost during the grind of my day job.

Instead of writing about her or someone else I know, I want to use the rest of this space to write about a couple of other people anyone can learn something about, and why I think they’re remarkable people.

I was reading a column on the internet recently, which I thought was so well-written that it caused me to do a little research on the townhall.com web site where the column had been originally posted. The writer’s name is Jennifer Roback Morse, and I took the time to read at least a dozen of her weekly columns. I know absolutely nothing about her, except that she has a doctorate in economics, she has taught at Yale, and she was a tenured professor at George Mason University, until she decided to give it up to follow her husband to the west coast, where she and her husband are raising one child of their own, an adopted child and two foster children. I have known many parents with their own children and adopted children, and some parents who are raising their own children and taking in foster children. I’ve never met anyone who did all three.

Ms. Morse has given up her distinguished academic career in order to be a stay-at-home mom, a personal sacrifice which inevitably lightens her wallet, deflates her ego, and lowers her social standing among many people. Yet I think her example is one of genuine greatness, because the only possible motivation for this sort of self-sacrifice is a deep love for other people and an understanding that a life lived for others is ultimately far more fulfilling than a life of self-absorbtion. Jennifer Morse is a Catholic, and I am deliberately not a Catholic. I gave up Catholicism more than thirty years ago, yet her writing convinces me that we have something in common which bypasses the theological differences between us.

Many liberals believe that nothing is worth dying for, and killing can only be justified if it’s done for one’s personal convenience, as is the case with abortion and in many cases, euthenasia. It stands to reason that if no cause is worth dying for, no cause aside from oneself is worth living for. The current trend toward self-absorbtion is so pervasive that it shows up even when people are arguing for things which seem to be good. My mother-in-law is on quite a health food kick, watching her own calories, diet and waist line, but also gossiping about the failure of others to do so. While I’m not under the illusion that any of us should live on a constant diet of doughnuts, I would like to have something better to say for myself at the pearly gates than “I ate a lot of fruits and vegetables, but not too many, of course.”

On the other hand, I have a friend in Michigan who, along with her husband, has raised five children. One of the things which I’ve always liked about her is that she is the sort of person who will always be taking care of five children, 50 animals or 500 plants. She wouldn’t be able to live alone with no plants or animals in a studio apartment, which I did when I was single, and I will always lag far behind her in the number of people and other living things she has nurtured. I can only admire people like her and Jennifer Roback Morse, who I will almost certainly never know, for their devotion to the greater good of others besides themselves. I will be reading Ms. Morse’s columns whenever I can find them.

I would like to close by saying something positive about someone else. We live in an age of terrorism, the random and indiscriminate murder of people for the sake of political objectives terrorism cannot possibly achieve. Aside from the infamous September 11 attack on the United States, one of the most cruel acts of terrorism took place on March 27, 2002, in Israel during a Passover celebration. I am not Jewish, and I have no theological interest in Judaism, other than its relationship to Christianity. I grew up in the Catholic church, which I have left as an adult. But the high point of Catholicism for me was the midnight mass on Christmas Eve, when we would arrive at about 10:30 and sing Christmas carols for at least an hour before the mass began. It added something special to the celebration of the birth of Christ. So I can relate to the Passover massacre by imagining it taking place among Catholics at a midnight mass on Christmas Eve. It is in that light that the full horror of that act reveals itself to me.

For some time after that crime, I wondered what Americans like myself, who have very limited resources, could do to encourage the people of Israel. In that context, I found myself one day listening on the radio to Hugh Hewitt, who was interviewing another talk show host named Dennis Prager, a Jewish man who has visited Israel many times. After that, I began listening to Dennis himself, and I like him really well, which is quite remarkable, because I generally tune out anyone who doesn’t openly acknowledge the deity of Jesus Christ.

Dennis Prager is interesting, sometimes fascinating to listen to, because he has a very good understanding of the common ethical underpinnings of Judaism and Christianity. For example, I have heard him pose the question, “If there’s an emergency and you have only enough time to save your dog or a stranger, who should you save, and why?” Many people these days would save their dog, because it’s their dog, and they care much less about strangers than they do about anything that’s theirs. But the correct ethical response is to save the stranger, because human beings are more valuable than dogs. That should be inherently obviously to anyone, but it isn’t anymore. That point could be made in theological terms, such as the scriptural teaching that man was made in the image of God, or by the obvious fact that Jesus did not come to earth to give his life to save dogs. But the point can also be made in non-theological ways. How long would it take for dogs to invent the automobile or the airplane, to write books, music or poetry? Unfortunately, people need to be reminded of obvious self-evident truths, and Dennis reminds his audience Monday through Friday. I recommend his reminders.

ps. On May 1, 2006, Jennifer Roback Morse published a column on the townhall.com web site called “I have a (pro-life) dream”. It is an excellent column, well worth taking the time to read. I don’t know Mrs. Morse, but she is earning a place in heaven, or rather, on a new earth.

A MOST UNNATURAL OBSESSION

I was ten years old when I first heard of the Beatles. Aside from their longer than customary hair, the most noticeable thing about them was that most of their music seemed much louder than the American music which was current at the time, and they had what I thought was a bad habit of including a blood-curdling scream in the middle of about half their records in 1964.

Nevertheless, it soon became apparent, even to early critics like me, that they were talented, their melodies were frequently exceptional, and there was a sort of intangible and instinctive cleverness about what they said and did. So I got over most of my initial dislike for the Beatles themselves, and I even bought their records when they came out on CD years later. Though I never have been particularly fond of the title track, most of the “Hard Day’s Night” album is still fabulous to listen to today, and it probably always will be, and there are at least a few superb tracks on virtually all of their albums.

Yet I never could make peace with Beatles fans. I hated the hysterical screaming which accompanied their concerts and all of their public appearances. It seemed like a sort of madness had gripped my generation, a madness which caused people to be obsessed about every Beatles-related thing, and, in effect, made the Beatles objects of worship, rather than simply talented musicians to enjoy. People grew their hair because the Beatles grew their hair, they experimented with drugs because the Beatles experimented with drugs, they tried transcendental meditation because the Beatles tried transcendental meditation, etc. Even when they didn’t want to, they seemed to be leading the world around by the nose. I often wished the Beatles would disappear, just so people would have to resume thinking for themselves.

But whether they intended to or not, the Beatles started a trend which is with us to this day. We are inundated these days with people far less talented than the Beatles, yet many people seem to be completely hypnotized by an entire gaggle of very forgetable celebrities. Most of these so-called superstars (no one is just a star anymore) are quite wealthy, but they also appear to be spoiled, senseless people who possess no integrity and every bad habit known to man.

The reason I’m writing this is because I ride the bus to work every morning. Most mornings the radio on the bus is tuned to a local fm station which literally devotes an hour every day to the latest celebritie gossip, things we need to know, like who slept with who last night, who’s looking for a good sperm donor, who has violated their prenuptual agreement, who’s splitting up today, what the terms of their divorce settlement are likely to be, which of the partners had the affair which is causing them to split up, how many affairs they’ve both had, who’s coming out of the closet, etc. I have asked the bus drivers to turn off this inexcusably lurid babble, only to have other passengers ask the driver to turn it up instead. Of course, 90% of the so-called gossip which is being broadcast is probably at least partially false. But even if it were 100% accurate, why does anyone believe the private lives of the rich and famous are properly their concern? It is normal to be fond of a great singer or musician, a great actor or actress, a great athlete, a great author, or any prominent person whose work one happens to enjoy. But it is definitely not normal to want to peep through their windows. It is a societal sickness which gets worse every day, and I really wish I could get Americans to stop it.

IF WE WIN THE WAR, WILL IT MATTER?

I hope we win the war in Iraq. I hope that we and the Iraqis crush the insurgency and that democracy spreads throughout the entire Middle East. I applaud President Bush for trying to make that happen. I am part of the stubborn 40% of the country (give or take a little) who is fond of the president and wishes him well.

But I wonder what even the most complete victory in the Middle East would do for us. Some will argue that victory would be much better than defeat, and certainly that’s true. But what will we gain if all we create is a democratic Hamas-loving Middle East? Democracy, by itself, will not be enough, because the real problem throughout the Middle East (even in Israel) is a spiritual problem which armies, particularly armies from officially secular nations, cannot hope to resolve. I don’t know if we can afford to walk away from this conflict, and I don’t know if we can afford not to. The only thing I’m certain about is that no one will see me on a peace march, because I am unwilling to do anything which might discourage the members of our armed services, who are risking their lives for something better than peace–they are risking their lives in the hope for a just peace.

But the war in Iraq isn’t really what I want to write about. It seems to me that priority number one after September 11 should have been to regain control of our borders and to stem the flood of illegal immigrants, since at least a few of them may be inclined to become terrorists. Even if we are successful in the Middle East, but we fail to realize that homeland security begins at home, we will eventually have national catastrophes which will make September 11 seem as tame as an ice cream social.

The possibility of massive terrorism on our own soil should be a serious concern to all of us. But just for a moment, let’s forget about terrorism and pretend the Middle East doesn’t even exist. While we’re at it, let’s forget about China, Russia, Venezuela and Bolivia. Focus instead on our immediate neighbors to the south, and what Mexico is exporting to us.

Earlier this week researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso issued a report about the 24 counties in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California which are on the U.S.-Mexican border. If those counties were a 51st state, they would rank first in federal crime, second in tuberculosis, third in hepatitis and fifth in diabetes. This 51st state would be near the bottom in educational achievement, near the bottom in the number of people who have any type of insurance, near the bottom in doctor/patient ratios and near the bottom in per capita income. Basically, this 51st state would be an American glimpse into the third world. We hear loud voices in our country, claiming that we need illegal immigrants are necessary to fill jobs Americans don’t want. Many, but not nearly all, of those voices come from the hispanic community. But don’t hispanics realize that they will disproportionately bear the burden of the crime, disease and poverty Mexico is exporting to us? Also, it’s one thing to argue that we need illegals to fill jobs, but it’s quite another thing to argue that we need a constant and ever-increasing flood of them to fill jobs.

This isn’t just a border problem. It’s impacting every state in the country. Treating the uninsured is causing hospitals to go bankrupt. The more the United States begins to look like Mexico, the more we will regret it. We must close our borders. Then, and only then, can we think about a guest worker program. Our national sovereignty must be our top national priority.

THE CHICKEN, THE EGG AND THE GALLUP POLL

It has now been more than 80 years since the infamous Scopes monkey trial and the confrontation between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. I don’t think most Americans know that Clarence Darrow lost the case (though the fine against Mr. Scopes was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court), or that the law forbidding the teaching of evolution in Tennessee public schools was upheld by the Tennessee Supreme Court and remained on the books until 1967.

Based on what has happened in the educational system in the United States since 1925, it would be natural for anyone to assume that Clarence Darrow won his case and that the Bible had been disproven and would soon be permanently dislodged from the American psyche.

That’s why I found a recent Gallup poll so interesting. I normally ignore polls of all kinds, because they change constantly, which makes them fairly insignificant. But I doubt if the results of this poll vary much from month to month or from year to year. According to Gallup, 53% of Americans still believe the origins of man were closer to the Genesis account than to Charles Darwin’s theory. Gallup did not ask whether Americans believe in six literal days of creation followed by a sabbath rest, but he did ask whether Americans believe God created human beings (as is) without an evolutionary process, and that’s what the 53% said they believe. 31% said they believe in some form of evolution, with God guiding evolution behind the scenes. 1.2% said they believe in evolution apart from God, and the rest were undecided.

Discarding the undecideds and the in-betweeners, the most interesting contrast is between Darwinists (or atheists) and people of faith, who cling to their faith over the objection of modern science, the educational system and the media. Pure chicken people outnumber pure egg people by a ratio of 44 to 1. William Jennings Bryan won his case, and he is still winning it by a landslide. While the Gallup poll doesn’t prove anything about the origins of man, it does prove most of us don’t believe what we were taught in school, a place where the Bible and a God-centered theory of creation have been systematically banned for 80 years. Is education even relevant if we don’t believe what we are being taught?

There are only two possible responses to this. One would be to bring a belief in God back into our classroom. But the educational establishment and the courts won’t allow that. If they allow intelligent design or anything else besides godless evolution to be taught in school, the Darwinists will absolutely disappear off the map, since they’re not even being taken seriously now, under the most favorable possible circumstances. The only other possible approach for the educational establishment is for Darwinists to redouble their efforts to indoctrinate us and to mock and ridicule anyone who disagrees with them. That’s where we’re headed. Expect more and more Da Vinci code books and more and more mocking and persecution of Christians. It’s going to be a wild and bumpy ride. But the secular humanists will continue to fail, because every belief system which isn’t rooted in the scriptures is sterile and only brings suffering and disillusionment.

GOODBYE KIRBY

There have been two major stories about baseball this week, Monday’s untimely death of Kirby Puckett and Tuesday’s release of excerpts from an upcoming book about Barry Bonds. Baseball always has found a way of staying in the news during the offseason, but this is not the normal sort of offseason news baseball deliberately generates every year.

I have particularly fond memories of Kirby Puckett. In an era of rich, spoiled and selfish professional athletes, he always seemed so congenial and friendly. He seemed to be miscast in this era, because he only played for one team throughout his career, and he never seemed to have the sort of vanity which demands a move to New York and a candy bar named after him. In an era where so many athletes fall short of their potential on and off the field, Kirby Puckett gave 100% of what he had. I have seen many ballplayers who seemed destined for the hall of fame the first time they stepped on the field. Kirby Puckett was not one of them. He was certainly a good player, but he didn’t necessarily seem destined for the greatness he achieved.

Before I go on, I should acknowledge that I am a lifelong Minnesota Twins fan, and I have followed the Twins since Harmon Killebrew was in his prime and Tony Oliva was a rookie. I’ve always had a special admiration for players like Rod Carew, who played for much of his career on bad teams in Minnesota without complaining about it–teams that not only didn’t win, but teams which weren’t well-supported even by the people of Minnesota. I can remember years ago when I would sometimes hear that the Twins only drew three or four thousand fans to a major league game, and Calvin Griffith, who owned the team at the time, had no other source of income outside of baseball to build a dynasty with. Rod Carew eventually signed with the Los Angeles/California/Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels, and I thought about taking my allegiance with him, but I just couldn’t do it. Kirby Puckett became one of the reasons, perhaps the best reason, why I never regretted not abandoning the Twins. Seeing the Minnesota Twins win the World Series twice seemed as unlikely as seeing the Rice Owls win the national championship in football and basketball during the same season. Dream on Rice fans.

But from the time he got glaucoma and had to retire, nothing seemed to go well for Kirby Puckett, except for the hall of fame induction. There was an ugly divorce, with allegations of threats and physical violence, there were sexual assault charges regarding another woman (he was acquitted), and finally an increasing weight problem, which led to a stroke which ended his life. I’ve wondered this week whether Kirby Puckett really wanted to live anymore, whether a life after baseball was simply unsatisfactory to him. Perhaps I’m reading too much into what happened to him after he was forced to retire, but perhaps not. Nevertheless, the good memories are greater than the bad ones, and I can only wish someone could have given Kirby Puckett as much as he gave to the rest of us.

As for Barry Bonds, I’m firmly convinced he used steroids. They considerably enhanced his skills, but once someone sells their soul to the devil, the devil can call for his end of the bargain whenever he chooses. His steroid use has probably contributed to his knee injury, and it will probably shorten his life. A man who doesn’t use steroids may get into an argument with his girlfriend, but the same man on steroids is likely to slam his girlfriend’s head through a glass window. I saw an interview with former Denver Bronco/Oakland Raider Bill Romanowski recently, and I could only feel sorry for him and sad about the consequences he now must face. He seemed confused, like a man who is permanently drunk, even if he hasn’t been drinking, and all for the sake of money and final scores no one will remember anyway.

What I really don’t like about baseball these days has nothing to do with the Minnesota Twins being a so-called small market team. In 1919, eight players from the Chicago Black Sox fixed a World Series and altered the outcome of one baseball season. They were banned from baseball forever. Now players cheat and change the outcome of every season, yet no one has been banned for life, and Barry Bonds will still get to play this year. I bet the case against him is far better than the case against shoeless Joe Jackson ever was.

Baseball once put an asterisk beside the name of Roger Maris, because he hit 61 home runs in a 162-game season, and Babe Ruth hit 60 in a 154-game season. Maris was hated by some people at the time for breaking Ruth’s record. Now it has become obvious that his record never should have had an asterisk beside it, but Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds never belonged in the record book. The gutless people who run baseball now banned Pete Rose from baseball for life, and that’s OK with me, but they won’t do anything to today’s cheaters.

Someone may ask, “How do you know Kirby Puckett didn’t use steroids?” I don’t think he did, but the answer is that I don’t know. Judgment day belongs to God, not to me, and that’s a good thing. As for baseball, it remains interesting, in spite of woefully bad leadership. But it could be better and more honest, and I wish it were.

TRUE BLUE, A CONFUSING HEW

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m totally blind. I lost my sight shortly after birth, so I am unfamiliar with colors. I try to conceptually imagine what they might look like, but it’s impossible for anyone to explain them to me, just as it would be impossible for me to explain to someone who has always been deaf how to differentiate between the sound of a clarinet and a piano if they could hear. I know some colors are bright, such as red, yellow or orange, and some colors are dark, such as black and brown, but that’s about all I know.

If I woke up tomorrow morning with normal vision, one of the first things I would do, after I became visually acquainted with my wife and children, would be to ask someone to show me all of the objects around me which are blue, because blue is the most curious of colors.
All of the colors of the American flag refer to something in particular, and I believe blue is for faithfulness. I remember the song, “Love is Blue.” I’ve never heard anyone suggest that love might be green or purple. So love is blue. But there wasn’t a lot of love between union and confederate soldiers during the American Civil War, when the union soldiers wore blue and the confederates wore gray. So I try to imagine navy blue and soldiers in their dress blues. So blue may be lovely, but it’s military too. Also, I know that some universities, the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina, for example, use blue as one of their school colors, and they don’t seem to be motivated by love when I watch their sports teams. So I would ask someone to show me a loving, patriotic and combative blue.

I’ve heard all my life that when the weather is nice, skies are blue, and gray skies indicate stormy weather. So it seems to me that blue must be quite pleasant. But when people are depressed, they have the blues. Shouldn’t they have the grays? That would make more sense to me. No one sings rhythm and grays, and people who sing rhythm and blues don’t usually seem very happy to me. So blue is the color of pleasant weather and depression. I can’t figure that one out.

If I want expert advice, I should consult a blue ribbon panel, because people with blue ribbons have either become experts or they’ve won a contest. Some companies use the color blue. IBM is known as big blue. People who wear suits and ties often wear blue. So I think blue must be the color for excellence and professionalism. But I can’t wear blue jeans to work, because they’re not professional.

My wife says blue jeans aren’t necessarily blue, it’s just a style. I know that the texture of blue jeans is different than the texture of other pants, but why do people call pants which aren’t blue blue jeans? I’ve heard that the blue Danube isn’t really blue, it’s green or something else, but not blue, I suppose “Blue Bayou” is only a song and the bayou isn’t blue, and the bluegrass in Kentucky is just a brand of green grass. A blue moon occurs on those rare occasions when there are two full moons in the same month, but it doesn’t mean that the moon is blue. I’m afraid to ask what color blueberries are.

Years ago many businesses in the United States were closed on Sunday, and there were laws mandating such closures. They were known as blue laws. So blue must have something to do with God and holiness. But I remember that porn films used to be called blue movies. Who ever heard of a naughty sabbath rest?

I know that blue occupies a large portion of the spectrum people can see, and the brain interprets many colors as various shades of blue. I understand that contrasting things can be the same color, but most basic colors are associated with specific concepts and emotions. Thinking back to the American flag, I understand that red is used to get everyone’s attention, whether one thinks of red roses, hunters wearing red or a red traffic light. I understand that white is the color of light, cleanliness and purity. But I’m confused about blue, aren’t you?

THE MISSILES OF FEBRUARY

I was working as a freelance writer for a magazine years ago when the assignment came. Another writer and I were asked to do an interview with John Denver. We made a list of questions we wanted to ask, and the magazine gave us a list of questions they wanted information about for an upcoming article.

John Denver had recently been divorced by his first wife, and the interview was going quite well until I mentioned that we had information that another woman had recently broken off an affair with him. I said, “This woman says you’ve been harassing her since the breakup. Is that true?” Denver shot back, “That’s none of your business. You have no right to ask a question like that.” “John,” I replied, “You have no idea how little this question interests me. I don’t care what your answer is. This question comes from the editors.” I showed him my list of questions from the magazine. “This interview is over.” he snapped, “I want you both to leave.”

So we left and began walking downhill toward our car, which was parked about half a mile away. I was wondering what sort of article we would be able to write, based on an incomplete interview, and I was thinking about all of the other questions I should have asked before I got to the uncomfortable question which caused him to ask us to leave. Suddenly there was a bright flash and an explosion. My colleague said, “I didn’t think he would take it this hard. That was a shoulder-fired missile.” “You’ve got to be kidding.”, I responded. “Mr. Poems, Prayers and Promises is trying to kill us.”

That’s when I woke up from my dream and realized that John Denver is still dead, and I’m still alive. But it was a close call. I always thought being a freelance writer would be fun, but maybe not. I bet I’m a novelist in my next dream.

HOLIDAY REFLECTIONS

As I sit here on this Presidents Day weekend, I can’t help thinking what a meaningless holiday it is. On the third Monday of every February, we celebrate, or fail to celebrate, a day which equally honors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as though none of us had a preference between the two. We celebrate George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, alongside Millard Filmore, Franklin Pierce and Chester A. Arthur, as though they were equivalent in every respect. To add to that, this is a holiday which has absolutely no tradition, except perhaps for sales by a few retailers. So if I were to rank the holidays, in terms of their significance or value, Presidents Day is probably only preferable to Halloween, since Halloween has always been, on some level, a celebration of everything evil, wicked and creepy. But even Halloween has more tradition behind it, and in its most innocent form, is far more fun for children than Presidents Day, which replaced a more noble holiday, often celebrated as Washington’s birthday and sometimes celebrated as Lincoln’s birthday. This holiday serves no useful function, other than giving people a day off, which I am in favor of. But I would prefer to have it replaced by a heartfelt celebration of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, a self-educated white man who became an abolitionist, without any personal benefit to himself, a hundred years before Rosa Parks decided not to give up her seat on a bus, something Abraham Lincoln would probably not have asked her to do for him. Lincoln emancipated the slaves and kept the union together. Yes, there were bumps in the road, and the Civil War cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their lives. But Lincoln’s leadership resolved the greatest moral and political dilemma this nation faced for a hundred years. Keeping the union intact prepared Americans to take a positive role in the two world wars of the 20th century. Just out of rivalry with their neighbors, it’s almost certain that some Americans would have fought for the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II if the nation had been allowed to split apart. Yet Lincoln’s legacy is largely forgotten by most Americans today.

With regard to other holidays, I don’t mind that there is now a Martin Luther King holiday, except that it is the only holiday named after an individual American. It would seem to imply that Martin Luther King made a greater contribution to this nation than anyone else ever has, and I don’t believe that. But it does serve as an interesting reminder that true leadership may not come from elected officials or the institutionalized halls of power, and that’s probably a good thing. If MLK Day is partly a reaction to his assassination in 1968, I wonder if anyone would be considering a Medgar Evers day if it had not taken place. I have lukewarm feelings about MLK Day as a national holiday. I acknowledge that the untimely and unjustified deaths of Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers are part of the dark side of American history, but I can make a case that the Kennedy assassinations were even more disappointing. My suggestion about MLK Day, let’s keep it, I’ll get used to it.

Beyond that, Columbus Day ranks as a major national waste of time, partly because it was so long ago, partly because the benefits to Europeans were offset by the demise of many who were already here, and partly because the holiday isn’t celebrated and has no real traditions of its own. Also, I have read two different accounts of the motivation of Christopher Columbus, and motivation is crical in this case. One version is that Columbus wanted to spread the gospel to the orient or to whatever lands he found, and I don’t have a problem with that. But I’ve also read that his trips to the new world were primarily in pursuit of wealth. It’s OK with me if a man wants to be wealthy, but I wouldn’t make a national holiday out of it. Here’s my suggestion. Let’s replace Columbus Day with “one giant leap for mankind day” on or around July 20, in honor of the Apollo 11 flight to the moon. It was the perfect triumph of American ingenuity. Besides, no one can accuse us of going to the moon to get wealthy, since there’s nothing up there anyway.

Then there’s Labor Day, when most Americans take off and refuse to labor. I used to think Martin Luther King Day should just be called Civil Rights Day, but Labor Day reminds me that every cause needs a sort of patron saint to make it meaningful, and the labor movement never adopted one. Labor unions in America have been on the decline for decades, and I suspect that younger Americans believe Labor Day has something to do with the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. My suggestion, let’s find Jimmy Hoffa and lose Labor Day.

Now we come to Veterans Day, a holiday with a good idea, but no traditions. Most businesses are open on Veterans Day, but most government offices are not, and therein lies the true genius of Veterans Day. Perhaps every day should be Veterans Day. I think Americans should get November 11 as a day off, conditionally. When America is at war, a day off should be given to any American who does something for members of the armed services or their families. It could be something as simple as writing a letter to a soldier or contributing money to a scholarship fund for their children. Regardless of how one might feel about a given conflict, the families of people who have been asked by this nation to risk their lives on our behalf ought to have whatever support we can offer. I think everyone should get the day off during times of peace, but it ought to be a time to reflect about how to prevent future conflicts, as well as a time to honor veterans of previous wars.

Then there’s Memorial Day, the cultural beginning of summer. It used to be a time to decorate the graves of soldiers, Decoration Day, or to visit the graves of anyone who is important to us. But we, who are living, don’t seem to like being reminded that we are all headed for a cemetery somewhere, where our bones or ashes will lie, and our lives will be forgotten by the living who will soon join us. Memorial Day has lost its punch, and the Indianapolis 500 can’t compete with Nascar anymore. Memorial Day is a good idea which would serve us well if we would serve it well. But we won’t. So I think we should keep the day, but we should change it to Gardening Day, a day when Americans plant a tree or plant fruits, vegetables or flowers.

That leads us to July 4, not just a celebration of American independence, but a bold proclamation that every holiday doesn’t have to be on Monday. This year July 4 will be on Tuesday, and it just dares us to take Monday off and have a long weekend. It doesn’t allow us to celebrate it on a day like Presidents Day, which is actually no president’s birthday. It demands that we remember it as an important day all by itself, inconveniencing us at times, but never allowing us to inconvenience it. It’s true that fireworks are banned in most places now, and the United States isn’t very united these days, and it is also marred by the fact that it comes soon after the U.S. Supreme Court recesses after announcing their final annual verdicts, which recently have been a source of great national shame. Yet Quatro de Julio stands out as uniquely American, defying the rest of the world and the half of this country which believes that anything uniquely American must be bad. It’s not the fireworks, but the “in your face” nature of July 4 which I like best.

Then there’s New Year’s Day, a day for making resolutions we won’t keep, a day for watching the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl, and we know the final score really doesn’t matter. OK, this year they didn’t play the Rose Bowl until January 4, and the final score did matter, at least in Texas. But the point of the holiday is that we all need a new beginning from time to time, an introspective time to think about what we’ve been through and to plan for something better.

Thanksgiving is unsurpassed in its food, its turkey, its dressing and its pumpkin pies. It does force us to travel sometimes, sometimes to or from places where the weather isn’t nice in November. As long as we can minimize conflicts with our relatives and enjoy being with them, Thanksgiving is fairly nice, except that women always put the bird on the table at the pivotal part of the football game. I guess they don’t understand, I guess it can’t be helped.

As for Christmas, it would be easy to go on a rant about how it is spoiled by commercialism, by the myth about flying reindeer and Santa Claus, and by the politically correct crowd who want to pretend that Hanukkah, Kwanza or any other day in December is its equivalent. But perhaps those shortcomings are just meant to show us how wonderful Christmas really is, because if God did send his son in human form to live among us, knowing how we would abuse, corrupt, deny and minimize the celebration and significance of his birth, he must love some of us a great deal, and that makes Christmas truly significant.

Now we come to the most significant holiday of all, which is Easter. I’m not that crazy about the Easter bunny, though the Easter egg hunts can be fun. Whenever I read the first 10 verses of chapter 37 of Ezekiel, where an angel shows Ezekiel dry bones of the dead and asks, “Can these bones live?”, it seems to me that I am reading one of the most significant passages in literature. Ezekiel’s answer is “Sir, you know.”, which is sort of like saying, “Of course.” If the answer is in fact “No”, we have very little to look forward to in this life, and very little reason to live at all. But if the answer is “Yes”, and more specifically, if 1 John 5:11 is true which says, “He has given us eternal life, and that life is in his Son.”, there is quite a good reason for life, both here and hereafter. The obvious argument against anyone’s resurrection is that dead humans are unable to do anything about death. But even if humans can’t violate the laws of nature, it seems reasonable that God can violate them, that he has violated them in the past, and that he will violate them in the future. Anyone who discounts God’s power should at least be intellectually honest enough to ask why dispersed Jews have been able to keep their identity for thousands of years. Where are the Amalekites? Where are the Philistines? Everyone is fighting about the future of Jerusalem, just as the scriptures have predicted, and Psalm 16 says, “you will not allow your Holy One to see corruption (bodily decay)”, the tomb is empty and the New Testament indicates Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people after his resurrection. Perhaps that explains why so many early Christians gave their lives and they were unwilling to deny what they knew happened on the first Easter. The only thing wrong with our celebration of Easter is that the Catholic church tied its place on the calendar to a pagan holiday, rather than to the feast of Passover, which is when it should be celebrated. But no one really believes Jesus was born on December 25, and the important thing is that it’s on the calendar, not where it is on the calendar.

Oh, I do have one other favorite holiday, St. Patrick’s Day. I don’t drink green beer or go to Irish pubs, and I really don’t care much whether St. Patrick got the snakes out of Ireland or not. But one of my sons has a birthday on March 17. He thinks it’s an important holiday, and so do I.

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ABOUT GOVERNMENT EMPLOYMENT

I haven’t written anything for this blog in a month. One week I wanted to write about an e-mail message I got from a co-worker, which I thought was inappropriate. I was going to write about how people don’t take their electronic communications very seriously, how they don’t even read through their own messages before sending them and they send out messages full of misspellings and obrious typos which could easily have been fixed, and most of all, how they fail to realize how much more permanent electronic communications are, how little control over who winds up reading them the author has, how quickly they can be reproduced and sent to millions of people, and how our e-mail and blog messages might outlive us all. But I didn’t want to write about a co-worker, knowing people have been fired for doing it, and besides, this was a co-worker I actually like, even if we did have a short verbal spat.

Then there was the week when I didn’t write a blog entry because I wanted to write about the woman who sits next to me, whose heart monitor went “beeeeeeep” for 30 minutes, indicating she was having a coronary event. Aside from not wanting her to die beside me, and not wanting her to die at all, I was disturbed when she said she didn’t want anyone to notice. She has an automated monitor which makes an automatic call to a hospital when she has coronary events, and I know she is smart and I should believe she can take care of herself. But I also know that when someone has a heart attack or a stroke, a moment’s worth of indecision about how to react can be fatal. On the one hand, I want to be sensitive to her feelings, and I don’t want to try to help her take care of herself if she’s doing it already. On the other hand, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life asking myself why I didn’t get some help for her sooner, or why I allowed her to die without intervening in a natural way. It’s very stressful to me to feel restrained from speaking to anyone about something as serious as this. So now I’ve done it, and it’s public record. Now I can make the following announcement: “Death in my cubicle is strictly forbidden. Violators will be punished.”

That was a couple of weeks ago, and the heart monitor went off again this week, and she was on the phone complaining about shortness of breath and chest pain. I said nothing, I did nothing, because I have been told to say nothing and do nothing. That brings me to the second part of this story. I realize this lady has significant health challenges, and I suppose it’s courageous that she tries to keep a job at all. But it does bother me how management handles the situation. She only comes to work about 50% of the time, usually arriving hours late, and often leaving early. When any of the rest of us call in sick, or we are going to be late, e-mails are sent to everyone in the office, but this situation is treated with complete silence. When I asked a question about it one day, another of my co-workers said, “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t know.” “Refuse to ask, refuse to tell, refuse to know.” Now one might suppose that I’m complaining here about a double standard, because there’s one set of rules for her and one set of rules for the rest of us. But the truth is that I’m willing to have a double standard, for a good and specific reason, I just can’t stand the deliberate silence. I don’t see why we can’t get together and agree as a group that we’re going to treat this situation differently. Do we really have to keep our mouths shut until this woman quits or dies? But I couldn’t write a blog entry about that, so I went another couple of weeks without writing anything.

Then there was this week, when all of the Bush-bashing John Kerry Democrats I work with were hoping that Harry Whittington, the vice president’s hunting buddy, would die, so that Vice President Cheney could be tried for murder. Perhaps he would get the chair, and that would make them happy, and it seems to me that therein lies the real problem, they’re just unable to be happy. The vice president has been accused of not reporting his mistake promptly enough to those who hate him and not spending every waking hour for the rest of his life begging for forgiveness from his merciless adversaries–the same adversaries who have never wanted even an ounce of accountability from Ted Kennedy, whose mistake did cost someone’s life, and who has continued to be a Democratic icon for 37 years without answering a single question about it. That’s when it hit me. I never noticed this in the private sector. Perhaps this only applies to government workers. Unfortunately, government employees are notorious time wasters on the job. Yes, there are some professional people who work hard on their assigned tasks, but they are the minority. But the level of effort put forth by many government employees is about as minimal as the heartbeat of someone whose heart monitor is going beeeeeeep. It just occurred to me this week that the laziest government workers are generally the most vocal liberals. One can make a fairly accurate guess about a government worker’s politics, based on the level of effort they’re putting into their job. As the reader may have guessed, I am the token Republican where I work. I didn’t speak up about my preference for the GOP when I was hired, because when I accepted my government job, I was just a Republican. Now I’m a REPUBLICAN, watching Democrats work, or rather, refuse to work. During the 2004 election year, they went on for hours and hours, claiming the president’s daughters (who they do not know) are drunken sluts. I don’t know Jenna or Barbara Bush either, so I can’t comment on their character. But I do know for sure that my co-workers are not being paid by taxpayers to assess and enumerate the virtues and vices of the Bush twins. But I can’t afford to write a blog entry about this either, so job-related blogging is probably out of the question from now on. The main point here is that as long as I’m working with government employees, I will never be tempted to stand up and say, “group hug.”

SOME THINGS ARE JUST RIDICULOUS

My general feeling is that nothing can be more ridiculous than the U.S.A.’s immigration policy–especially with regard to Cuba. In the early years of the Castro regime, we took in virtually everyone who tried to flee from Castro’s Cuba. That made a certain amount of sense, because Cubans have been so desperate to get off the island to Florida that they have even tried to make old Buicks seaworthy enough to make the crossing. I’m sure GM never intended for Buicks to be amphibious vehicles.

Then Castro began emptying his prisons, sending us all of his criminals and the mentally ill. How I wish we would send him ours! We have more of them.

Now we have a completely absurd immigration policy with regard to Cuban refugees, which resulted earlier this week in us sending 15 Cubans home, because they landed at an unused bridge off the Florida keys from which they could not walk to land. Any Cuban caught on such a bridge or caught out at sea is returned to Castro, where he or she faces a future bleaker than the one they were trying to get away from. Now when Cubans are on their way to Florida, they have every reason to be just as afraid of our Coast Guard as of their own people. History would be far different if the Indians had only created a navy to catch pilgrims and take them back to England.

The typical arguments in a case like this are that on the one hand, we can’t take every Cuban who wants to come here, just as we can’t take in every Mexican. Balanced against that is the argument that we ought not to turn them all away. But it seems to me that the best solution is to do one or the other. Either we should tell Cubans that they absolutely are not welcome here, in the hope that it would discourage them from trying to make the dangerous journey to Florida, or we should bring everyone here who we find on land or at sea, and only send them back if there are obvious reasons not to keep them. The route we have chosen instead is the most inhumane policy of all.

Ultimately, I think this all or nothing approach is also the solution to our immigration issue with Mexico and other nations. There are always going to be a few individuals we’ll want to send home because of their backgrounds, but we either need to take the rest of them or close our borders, and if we close our borders, we need to be absolutely determined to defend our national sovereignty.

THE CURE FOR THE COMMON COLD HEART

It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the Yom Kippur war. I began the year as a sophomore, and ended it as a junior on the campus of a state university.

I don’t have much fondness for public universities in general, places where they collect tuition, but care very little about the future of their students. During my college days, I came to the conclusion that there is probably just as much loneliness and despair on campus as there is in most nursing homes.

I graduated from a large public high school, yet many of us who felt we were bound for college had classes together throughout the day. As much as people complain about their high school experiences, there was, at least for me, a sense of community. We all knew each other. Even if we didn’t all like each other, there was some comfort in the familiarity we had with one another.

But college is different. Yes, there’s a lot of free time between classes when studying can be postponed. Yet there is something about the college environment which lets us know we are not indispensable, and the world can get along without us just fine. There were a lot of parties, but most of them centered around alcohol and drug abuse. Most of the people I knew who partied frequently had many more hangovers than friends. At the university I attended, I felt like just one card among ten thousand decks of cards which had been accidentally dropped on the floor.

I believe most college students struggle with issues far beyond the classroom. But being disabled on campus, as I was, makes the struggle far worse. For instance, I was taking an American history class during the spring of 1973. It was held in a large auditorium, and there were about 300 students in the class. Though the auditorium was generally quite crowded, I sat alone in any row I chose. The rows in front of me and behind me were always full, but no one sat near me. I am totally blind, and nearly everyone on campus seemed to feel it was contagious. From the time I began first grade in a public grade school to the time I graduated from a public high school, I had always been a fairly popular student. But when I went to a university, I became a social outcast, virtually a leper.

Yet I’m not writing this to complain. It is true that my freshman and sophomore years were so dismal that I was on the verge of suicide, but my junior and senior years were among the happiest in my life, no thanks to the university. The dismal early days were absolutely necessary. Nothing else could have brought me to a place where I was willing to change.

I don’t know why I’ve always chosen a different path, or more accurately, why a different path has been chosen for me. For instance, everyone in my family smokes. I tried to smoke a cigarette twice when I was about twelve years old, yet I never intended to be a smoker. I don’t mean for that illustration to sound self-righteous, I only mean that it puzzles me why I didn’t fit in, I didn’t choose to fit in, and for much of my life, I’ve been content to walk down my own road, whether the road was crowded or I walked it alone.

Partly as a result of the war in Vietnam, when I got to college, my peers were unusually eager to break the traditional taboos against discussing their political and religious beliefs with others. In the latter case, there was a subculture of “Jesus people” or “Jesus freaks”, depending on who you talked to. I was approached by them on a number of occasions. I was always interested in talking to them, but I found the experience both positive and negative.
On the negative side, they often traveled in pairs, and I found it odd that usually one of them would talk and the other one wouldn’t say a word, which gave me the impression that the silent partner was in training for future encounters when he would be the talker, and he would have a non-talker of his own with him. This made the experience seem very contrived. Also, none of the Christians ever seemed to want anything to do with me, other than sharing their faith. This made me feel at times that I was just a statistic they could report at a church or bible study. Generally, they were pleasant to be around, but I thought they were a little bit over the edge. Most of us like chocolate, but eating two ounces of chocolate is very different than eating a ten-pound bag of it. My attitude at the time was that two ounces of Jesus was fine, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the ten-pound bag. I felt they were over-consuming Jesus, Jesus bulemics, if you will, and I wanted a normal diet.

Yet I did agree to go to a bible study, which was sponsored by a group called the Navigators. Honestly, I found the bible study pretty boring, because it consisted of chapters and verses about things I already knew, it came to the obvious conclusions, it seemed sort of spoon-fed, and it didn’t give me the feeling that I understood scripture any better when I left. The leader was a fellow student named Rich Thompson, and he told me he had found out how he could get me a Braille bible. All 18 volumes of it arrived at my home during the Christmas break on January 5, 1973.

Along with the Bible, Rich sent a note saying that I should read chapter 3 of the gospel of John, which I now know is where Jesus told Nicodemus he must be born again. But I wasn’t about to read the bible Rich’s way. It was Friday afternoon, and I opened it up to Genesis and started reading from the beginning. By Sunday, I had read the first five books, and I had also been curious enough about the new testament to read the book of revelation.

I was surprised how little about the bible I actually knew. For instance, I had no idea there was a man named Joseph in the old testament. It’s a fascinating story. But I really struggled with some of the other passages in the old testament, such as one in which a man dies because he reaches out to grab the ark of the covenant because an ox stumbled. It seemed like an obvious thing to do, not a capital offense. Passages like that don’t trouble me anymore because I now understand the reason for them, but I was quite uneducated at the time. At one point, I decided to become an atheist, and I was for about 30 unhappy and uncomfortable minutes. Then I went back to my reading.

I stuck with it because there were several things in the book of revelation I couldn’t get out of my head. For example, I was fascinated by a passage which apparently describes a battle, whose end result is that blood will flow, as high as a horse’s bridle, for 1,600 stadia, or about 200 miles (Rev 14:20). Writing in the first century, John would have known nothing about warfare, except what he knew about the Romans. In ancient times, before gunpowder was even discovered, no human army could ever have produced such massive casualties on a battlefield. Such destruction could only result from a supernatural act, or from modern weapons the apostles had never seen. If the apostle John had been trying to create a clever fraud, he would never have included something like this, because it was unimaginable in his time. He could not have known this is possible, unless he really had the vision he described. Though it’s not at all a central part of the Christian faith, this is one of the passages which kept me on course and caused me to eventually become a Christian. Yet I have never heard it discussed in a church service, which is one of the reasons I believe everyone should study scripture on their own, rather than relying on what they think they know, what they hear on Sunday morning or a bible study someone has written.

Though no one else in my original family attends church, by the time I began reading the new testament, I was totally absorbed by it and could hardly think of anything else. I became a Christian on August 19, 1973, just before returning for my junior year in college.

When I returned to school in the fall of 1973, I was uncertain about how and where to put my new faith into practice. My friend Rich had gotten his master’s degree in the spring, and he had returned to his native Illinois. I wrote a letter to him to thank him for his efforts during the previous school year, and he answered my letter, but I haven’t had any contact with him since then.

In November I went to a weekend conference sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ. The speaker was a man named Josh McDowell, and I mention him here only because both then, and years later, I felt like a Jew listening to Moses when I heard him speak.

But Josh McDowell was a traveling evangelist, and what I was praying for was a local church I could attend. I had been raised Catholic to some extent, though my family’s Catholicism was sporadic at best. I’m not particularly anti-Catholic, but now that I was fully familiar with the scriptures, I knew I couldn’t go back to a church which had failed to teach much of what I now believed, and had taught instead things I do not believe. Unfortunately, though there are some devout Catholics, most of the Catholics I knew growing up did not take their Catholicism very seriously, and it had virtually no impact on their lives. The point here is not Catholic-bashing, but only to explain that I wanted to go somewhere where both I myself and the people around me would be fully committed to the church we attended.

During Josh McDowell’s conference, I met some people from a church called Christ is Life, which is still headquartered in the Dallas area, but had established a house church in Las Cruces, NM. It became my intention to live in Dallas after I graduated, but I couldn’t find a job there and wound up doing other things, so I haven’t attended church there since the 1970s.

However, much about Christ as Life still appeals to me today. So, for comparison and contrast, I want to say a little bit about it before I close. So I’ll make the following three observations, which I wish applied to most other Christian churches.

In some ways, Christ as Life was very conservative, in that the music was accompanied by a piano, there were no amplifiers, and they sang traditional hymns, which I believe are far more meaningful than the contemporary one-verse, over-modulated songs I hear in most churches today.

Secondly, I make no apology for the fact that Christ as Life was, and I presume still is, charismatic, not just in principle, but in practice. Most of the public discourse about the charismatic movement is with regard to speaking in tongues, and I believe in that, but the scriptures speak primarily about the gift of prophecy, and in practice, prophecy, wisdom, knowledge and discernment provide a level of accountability which isn’t found in most churches. For example, I overslept one morning and missed my morning classes. When I went to church that night, the pastor said, “If you care about your grades, you have to be in class.” This was revealed to him, not something someone told him.

When I was in Dallas on one occasion, I called my mom in Albuquerque, just to say hello. From the very beginning of the conversation, I felt sharp pain in my stomach, which I had no explanation for until she mentioned that one of my brothers, who was in Atlanta, was in the hospital with stomach problems. This sort of divine revelation is one of the keys to true Christianity, and it is unfortunately absent in most churches.

The third and final thing which made Christ as Life unique was an open pulpit, which allowed any man who felt he had a message for the church to speak. That doesn’t mean there was no leadership; it was understood that someone could be asked to sit down if they weren’t contributing something valuable, but that was rarely a problem. The point I really want to make here is not about an open pulpit, but about churches developing leaders. I have been to a lot of churches, which are centered primarily around one pastor, not apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, as the book of Ephesians instructs us. When the one man is out of town, church attendance usually drops by about half, and too many churches wouldn’t even exist without the leadership overwhelmed and underpaid pastors provide.

Anyway, the point of the three parts of this series is that the changes I went through during a short period in 1973 were so complete that they are almost indescribable. I heard an ad the other day, which was asking for participants in a study about depression. Prior to my conversion to Christianity, I used to know a lot about depression. I remember occasions when I forgot where I was or where I was supposed to go, and I would unconsciously go in the opposite direction. I went to the wrong class once and didn’t even realize it until the end of the period. But since I became a Christian, I can’t really even remember what depression feels like. Being lonely or depressed is completely foreign to me. I’ve been laid off three times, and I’m currently in a period where I don’t have many friends. It isn’t my preference, but it doesn’t phase me very much.

I know some Christians still have problems with depression. But if any man is in Christ, he is a new creation, and I’m convinced that reading and studying scripture daily changes everyone who does it.

I AM NOT A LEO

(originally posted on Blogspot)

Earlier this week, I decided to take a look at my Blogspot profile, which anyone on Blogspot has access to. Much to my surprise, the first thing I noticed was two things which had been added to my profile, which I did not wish for or request. My profile says I am a Leo, and I was born during the year of the snake.

I had to enter my birthday when I signed up on Blogspot, which is where they got the Leo from. Putting in the year when I was born was optional, but I chose to do it, because talking to a 16-year-old is much different, even than talking to someone who’s 30, because people in different age groups have had different life experiences, and they have different memories of the culture and events which have happened during their lives. Knowing at least someone’s approximate age gives a reader a different perspective about who a writer is. But because I entered my birth year, the year of the snake was added.

I thought about removing my birth year from my profile, but that wouldn’t get rid of the Leo part. So I’ve decided instead to take a few minutes to explain why I have no interest in either Babylonian or Chinese astrology.

First of all, the fact that there are two completely different astrological systems would make me suspect that at least one of them is invalid, even if I were interested in astrology, generally speaking. Like most Americans, I am mostly familiar with Babylonian astrology, and most of my comments apply specifically to it. Monday, January 9 was both the birthday of Joan Baez and the late Richard Nixon–same birthday, same sign, but hardly two people one would think of as soul mates. Similarly, Thursday, January 12 was the birthday of both Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. Yes, they’ve both made it in the radio business, but I suspect they despise each other.

The astrology buffs among us will respond to this by arguing that even though these people share a birthday, they were born in different years, the stars were aligned differently, etc., but they still read the horoscopes which make no such distinctions. It’s impossible to completely win an argument with them, because even if one names two completely different people who were born on exactly the same day, they will argue that they were born at different times of the day, and trying to find out the precise moment a famous person was born is almost as hard as finding out what moment they were conceived.

Astrologers may also argue that even if two people have different perspectives about life, they may still share similar personal traits. I never knew Richard Nixon, and I don’t know Joan Baez, so I can’t speak about their personal traits. But I used to know a set of twin girls who were born on the same day I was, and we had nothing in common. Also, I worked for a year with a woman who was very into astrology, and she talked about it constantly. One day I said to her, “You’ve know me for a year, tell me what sign you think I am.” Immediately she retreated to “I don’t know.” “Give me your best guess.”, I replied. She responded, “I really have no idea, but there are earth signs, air signs, water signs and fire signs, and I would guess you are not one of the fire signs.” So instead of picking one out of twelve, she had only been able to eliminate three and was still trying to decide between the other nine. The problem is that she was already wrong, since Leo is one of the fire signs. In our heart of hearts, don’t we all know that astrology is as fictional as a flat earth?

For many years, Americans either believed intellectually that astrology is only a form of superstition, which was clung to by Nazis and other uncivilized people, and/or they held the spiritual conviction that astrology was a pagan practice associated with idol worship. But in the 1960s, some people began digging up the practice of astrology, and newspapers began to print daily horoscopes. Astrology made the big time when the Fifth Dimension sang “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In”. By the way, I like the Fifth Dimension, and even their Aquarius record is pleasant to listen to, as long as one doesn’t take it seriously. I was in high school at that time, and we were told that we were entering into the age of Aquarius, an age of peace, knowledge, revelation and wonderful human beings. But nearly 40 years have passed, and I’m still waiting for human beings to improve. As always, astrology has broken its promise.

People sometimes mention that the magi who followed the star to Bethlehem and the baby Jesus were astrologers. That’s true, but it’s totally irrelevant. Peter, Andrew, James and John were fishermen when they met Jesus, but they began fishing for men after they met him. Whatever Mary Magdalene was, she wasn’t the same after she met Jesus, nor was Paul the same after he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. Without exception, the story of the new testament is how people were changed by Jesus, not about what they were when they first met him. In the old testament, we are told that Rahab was a harlot before her faith prompted her to help the Israeli spies, but no sensible person would use that text to justify prostitution. So using the magi to justify astrology is similar to making a chicken sandwich with a raw egg.

So if it’s OK with the people at Blogspot, or even if it isn’t, I’m not a Leo, my sign is the sign of the cross, which is valid for every people, tribe, tongue and nation.

JOEL’S CHRISTMAS

During the Christmas season just passed, I occasionally caught myself thinking back to another Christmas long ago, the one I call Joel’s Christmas.

Some of my fondest memories of Christmas are of the Christmas of 1963. I was ten years old, and I was in fifth grade. What did I like about that Christmas?

Maybe it was the electric radio my mom bought me for Christmas. But it couldn’t be that, because nine days later, on January 3, 1964, one of my two brothers and my sister tried to take the radio away from me. I made the mistake of trying first to hang onto the radio, and then hanging onto the cord, accidentally pulling the cord out, so my Christmas present only worked for nine days.

Maybe it was the Christmas concert I was in at school, helping to sing Christmas carols with my fellow fifth and sixth graders, or maybe it was going to midnight mass, which I always liked because we went early and sang Christmas carols for about an hour. But I don’t even remember exactly what we sang.

But really there were two things which made that Christmas unique, Peggy and Joel. Peggy’s brother-in-law Ike had been one of my dad’s drinking buddies. Ike and Peggy’s sister Helen had seven kids, and we frequently visited them at their cabin outside of town, even after my father and mother separated, because my mom and Helen had also become friends.

Peggy was only 22 then. She had dropped out of college in Ohio, and she had come to live with Helen. I’m not sure why she moved to New Mexico, but she moved in with us after my parents separated a year earlier, because my mother was now a single parent, and she felt she needed someone to watch us kids, ages 13, 10, 8 and 5.

Peggy’s temporary addition to our family was an enormous benefit to us, partly because of the contrast she was to our recent experiences. My father was a moody and frequently violent alcoholic. I’ll skip the stories about that here, except for noting that there was a lot of tension at home until he left, because we never knew when he might lose his temper or what he might do to my mom or to any of us.

It seemed that Peggy found something for us to do every day. Sometimes she took us to her sister’s, sometimes she took us to movies, sometimes she read to us or played games with us at home. She helped us make decorations for our Christmas tree in 1963, and I enjoyed that. For the first time in years, everyone at my home was sober, which is significant by itself.

One thing I remember most about Peggy is that when one of her girlfriends would call her, she would say, “I’d be happy to come over, if you don’t mind me bringing Marilyn’s kids.” She might have complained that this babysitting gig was keeping her from having a life of her own, or she might have just left and abandoned us to our own devices. But she found ways to include us, even in her girlfriend times.

I knew all of Peggy’s friends, except for the one who got her pregnant and refused to marry her. Joel was born on August 30, 1963, and he became another temporary addition to my family. There isn’t really a lot I can say about Joel. All babies bask in society’s attention. They learn to smile, they coo, they cry, they need to be fed, they need to be changed, they deprive their mothers of sleep, and Joel was no different, except that he was born with bowel problems. He got very sick during the fall of 1963, and he had to have a colostome, which means he would always have to poop into a bag. Joel was sick from time to time, but he always recovered.

I was playing in my room on Sunday morning, March 1, 1964, just a few feet from the adjoining room Peggy and Joel shared. Both Peggy and Joel had been sick that weekend, but I didn’t think there was any real cause for concern until I heard Peggy yell, “Marilyn, Joel has stopped breathing.” After six months of life, Joel was dead, and he is buried in a small grave in Albuquerque.

During Joel’s life, one of my grandmothers also died, President Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson became president, Lee Harvey Oswald was killed live on national TV, President Kennedy was buried, I first heard about the Boston strangler after he killed his eleventh victim, Roger Staubach won the Heisman trophy, we listened to the Singing Nun, the Beatles became a cultural phenomenon, John Wooden was coaching what turned out to be his first national championship team at U.C.L.A., I first heard of a young comedian named Bill Cosby who had released a comedy album with a routine about Noah’s ark, and a boxer we still called Cassius Clay became the world’s heavyweight champion. But Joel never knew any of that, it was beyond the realm of his concerns. Joel never learned to walk or talk, he never went to school, he never rode a bicycle, he didn’t win the Heisman trophy and he didn’t grow up to be president.

I called my mom into my room the night Joel died and tried to articulate my questions to her. She told me that even people her age (36 at the time) don’t die very often, and most ten-year-olds have a lot of life to look forward to. But none of that helped me feel better. What I really wanted to ask was, “Does it matter what happened here today? If life is supposed to have a purpose, what was the purpose of this life? I’ve heard of original sin, but what does God do with babies who’ve had no chance to be saints and also don’t deserve an eternity in ehll?” It amazes me how infrequently theologians even try to address this issue. I have to trust a just God that Joel won’t be forgotten.

According to a popular song in 1963, “The saddest thing in this whole wide world is to see your baby with another girl.” That isn’t nearly as sad as when parents have to bury their children, and burying babies is especially difficult. Joel was buried on March 3, 1964, and Peggy went back to Ohio a few months later. I spent the Christmas of 1964 at my surviving grandmother’s, but another Christmas with Peggy would have been more fun. I’ve tried to stay in touch with her, and I’ve seen her from time to time.

Joel’s death has given me a perspective about abortion most people don’t have, though I have no idea what sort of man he might have become or who he would have voted for. For me, all babies, born or unborn, ought to be cherished, regardless of the circumstances in which they were conceived.

Even now, more than forty years later, I feel a little bit nostalgic about Joel’s one and only Christmas, a Christmas I can never return to. I enjoyed that Christmas, but I realize now that I didn’t enjoy it enough. One of the things I learned from Joel’s death is that life is so fragile that we ought to approach every day with the knowledge that its blessings may only be temporary, and they must be enjoyed as fully as possible.

I’ve written this because the world has no reason to remember Joel, but I can’t afford to forget him. This is also an appeal to God to remember Joel when he opens graves and brings the dead out–not that God needs a reminder, but I want to remind him anyway. Joel doesn’t have much of a past, but I hope God will give him a bright future. By the way, Joel’s mother Peggy deserves a bright future too, if only because she was really a blessing to my family. She has earned it.

AMERICA THE MEDIOCRE

+++As 2005 ends and 2006 begins, I find myself asking what has changed about living in the United States during my lifetime–since 1953.

Certainly there have been positive changes. Because of Rosa Parks and others like her, no one has to sit on the back of a bus because of their complexion anymore. Also, there have been many technological advances–microwave ovens, CDs, e-mail, the internet, cell phones, ipods, etc., and those things often do make our lives more convenient and enjoyable. Yet I believe we Americans have lost more than we have gained, and unless we want to have a very bleak future, we ought to give some thought to what we
have lost.

I remember a time when my mother would go nextdoor to borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor, and neighbors would come to our house for similar reasons. I’m not sure how much we had in common with our neighbors, but we knew them all well. But television, personal computers, cell phones and ipods have created a world where we have much less contact with those around us. Our gadgets have isolated us from each other.

Ironically, when we really want to get away from civilization, we can’t. There is an enormous difference between living in the U.S. when its population was 180 million, as it was in 1960, and 300 million or so today. Even at airports in Montana, I have felt like someone in an elevator with more and more people getting on. The ever-increasing crush of humanity is everywhere, and it certainly exists in the Phoenix area where I live now.

I remember when “made in the U.S.A.” meant something was built in such a way that it would last as long as possible, and “made in Japan” meant something was a piece of junk. The Japanese made better and better things, but we didn’t. We didn’t just go back to making junk which could be improved on, we stopped making things altogether. We have gone from being a producing nation to being a consuming nation. We don’t lend, we borrow. We don’t produce our own energy anymore, we import it from people who chant “Death to America!” We’re so happy with this arrangement that our leaders won’t even vote to drill for oil we have, much less finding alternatives to oil. Foreign companies are running our ports, they’re even buying our roads and bridges, and the Communist Chinese are running the Panama Canal, which we built. We hear constantly about the outsourcing of American jobs to places like India, a nation we used to think was hopelessly backward. Though I can’t draw a direct cause and effect relationship, the outsourcing of American jobs seems particularly ironic, since American parents have been outsourcing the care of their children to others for two generations.

Then there’s the issue of public manners. In 1957, when Notre Dame ended Oklahoma’s 47-game winning streak, the Oklahoma fans gave the Notre Dame players a standing ovation. Now our football games are sort of like civil wars, with the fans chanting obscenities at the other team and the referees, and the spoiled athletes making throat-slashing gestures to their opponents. I’ve lost track of how many college football games have featured fights between the two teams, and I’m beginning to suspect that the World Series is won by the team with the best steroids. Now most people’s manners and sportsmanship are gone, and gone is the realization that we all have the same international enemies, and we might have to fight side by side on a real battlefield and give our lives for each other.

We’ve brought nightclub entertainment into our homes, and our kids are seeing more and more of it. We don’t demand anything from our entertainers, except special effects and louder noise. Our celebrities measure their marriages in hours, not years. Our babies often come before our marriages, if we bother with marriage at all. We’ve gone from modesty to online pornography, yet some of us are confused about which gender we should pursue. I grew up in a world which understood that men were meant for women and vice versa, but I can’t leave that world to my children. We’ve turned slaughtering the unborn into a constitutional right for our own convenience. Even though there is more and more obvious public misbehavior, most of our feel good churches are interested in attracting more and more people, but they’re seldom interested in inconveniencing them by telling them what sin is.

After an epidemic of illegal drug usage, businesses began drug testing to keep their employees drug-free, yet more and more of us are getting prescriptions to control our moods and our behavior, and we’re even putting preschoolers on Ritalin, since we can’t control them or ourselves.

We spend more and more money on education, but we are less educated. I remember when Sputnik made us want to excel in math and science, but we no longer find excellence in any academic discipline necessary. Too often, only the Asian students want to do well in the classroom, and the rest of us excuse our indifference.

We haven’t just lost confidence in our national direction and our leaders, we’ve lost confidence in the processes we use to choose them. We have more and more electronic gadgets, but our electrical grid is near collapse. Our automakers and our airlines are near bankruptcy, our air traffic control system is 40 years old, and many of our roads and bridges are in disrepair, yet no one sees past the next election. Too often, we value power and fame more than wisdom.

We borrow more and we save less. When I was a kid, our grocers remembered all of our names and what we liked to buy. But now, it’s more and more difficult to find an employee in a retail establishment who wants to help customers. When I ask for help finding something in a store now, I often hear a response like, “They don’t carry that” from an employee, which convinces me that I can’t get what I want there and the employees feel no desire for my business or any connection with their employer.

Doesn’t it seem odd to anyone that we have more and more music with no melody, no harmony, no chord progressions, yet people turn it up louder and louder just to hear the obscene lyrics. I saw a children’s cartoon recently where one of the characters told children that if they fart, they should blame it on the person nearest to them. I can’t imagine Captain Kangaroo telling them that.

What has happened to the United States during my lifetime reminds me of the story of Solomon. Solomon was wealthy and wise, but Solomon forgot the God who had given him wealth, wisdom and peace. By the end of his life, Solomon had powerful enemies, and our enemies have multiplied exponentially during my time as an American. The fact that we have enemies shouldn’t destroy us, and it probably isn’t meant to, but surely it is a warning to us that we need to recover some of what once made this nation great.

I was born in a nation I loved and felt good about, even with its imperfections. Now I am growing old in a nation I feel increasingly alienated from. Worse than that, I can’t adequately explain to my own small children what my generation has failed to preserve for them, things which my children and theirs may never be able to recover. Everywhere I look, it seems that we Americans have lost our edge, our drive for innovation and excellence. Of course, that’s not universally true, but it is so common and so pervasive that it should concern all of us. We must rediscover the greatness of America and demand excellence from ourselves, or we will continue to reap the whirlwind of the consequences of our indifference. We have to resolve to do better, to ask more of ourselves and demand more from others. Our national existence and our individual lives depend upon it.

I am very aware that God is not an American, but I also know that I was born in this nation at a time when God had blessed us and had made these United States the pre-eminent nation on earth. We are just kidding ourselves if we think we are still in that position. I really want to die in a nation which is better and better off than it was when I was born. I do not want the United States to descend into the trash can of history. I am determined by faithfulness, integrity, prayer and just plain speaking up to improve whatever I can, with God’s help. But if we don’t change directions, things will only continue to get worse. This one nation, under God, is in a sad state of disrepair, and it’s the personal job of every one of us to change that, in whatever small way we can.

THE DECLINE OF MODERN MUSIC

Back in the 1950s, when rock n’ roll was new, and it was still hated by most of the musical establishment, some in the music industry decided that the public would be better served if “real musicians” gave awards to musicians who made “real music”. So they gave us the grammys, hoping they would inspire society to listen to something better than Little Richard or Chuck Berry. If that was the goal, the grammys have been a miserable failure. In the early years, they were dominated by “serious musicians” like Henry Mancini, but the grammys have long since given up their original purpose. Before we’re inundated with the media hype surrounding another batch of grammys, let’s take a look at how fixed, or broken, the music industry is.

The first grammys were handed out in 1959. Just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that the industry hadn’t had an axe to grind when it handed out those first awards, and they had wanted to honor the best new artists, according to the public’s actual tastes at the time. Perhaps they might have chosen to nominate Bobby Darin, the Champs, Connie Francis, the Kingston Trio, Ritchie Valens or the Teddy Bears as the best new artists of 1958, since they all had their first hits that year. Better Better yet, let’s suppose that the grammys had started in 1958, and they had to choose the best new artist(s) of 1957. Among others, they could have chosen Buddy Holly, the Coasters, the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmie Rodgers, Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka or Rick Nelson. This was the horrible mess the Grammys were supposed to fix.

Now it’s 2005, so think really hard and try to imagine who the nominees might be for the best new artist of 2004, without looking it up. Are you drawing a blank? I’m absolutely clueless about it. Even if I had to select the best new artist to emerge in the last 15 years, I wouldn’t be able to think of anyone who seems significant to me. The last new artist I actually like is Enya, and she’s hardly new anymore. Someone will try to dismiss my opinion by claiming that my taste in music is very conservative, and that’s true. I hear boom boxes blasting everyone to deafness every day, but I never, never hear anyone whistling a new tune in an elevator anymore. It’s not just because of wardrobe malfunctions that the Super Bowl has to feature someone as old as Paul McCartney.

Generally speaking, I am much more fond of older and quieter music than today’s contemporary music, and it’s worth pausing for a moment to explain why. When I was in college, one of the first things I discovered was that the students who partied the hardest and drank the most were the most unhappy and had the least amount to celebrate. Similarly, when someone’s music can be heard two or three blocks away, they seem to always be listening to something which is destructive, antisocial and/or obscene. It’s a safe bet they’re not listening to Lawrence Welk. When I listen to music, I listen for melody, harmony, chord changes, vocal qualities and lyrics, if there are any. The way music is presented is every bit as important as its lyrical content. For instance, back in the 1970s, I ventured into a disco. It was a very trendy place to be then, but I hated it. Due to the volume, it was impossible to speak to anyone. As I tried to imagine what use such a place might be, it occurred to me that aside from dancing, it was still possible to have physical or sexual contact with people in spite of the noise level, and I decided that discos must serve primarily as a prelude for one night stands. So I never went back, and I couldn’t wait for the 1970s to end.

Since then, unfortunately, things have gotten progressively worse. Though I can’t stand watching it, I’ve seen bits and pieces of “American Idol”. Aside from the fact that all of these “idols” sound virtually identical to me, the most obvious thing about it is that the entire show consists of people singing songs which are 30 or 40 years old. To get an idea of how ridiculous that is, or what bad shape the music industry is in, one has to try to imagine the Beatles in 1964 auditioning by singing songs from the 1920s. The worst music the Beatles ever recorded were cover versions of other people’s music. I hate “American Idol”. My loathing for it goes beyond my ability to describe it. OK, I did halfway enjoy watching Gladys Knight as a judge. But it’s only people like her and Smokey Robinson I can enjoy, not the contestants. Way back in 1960, there was a popular song called “Sixteen Reasons”, which was sung by a woman named Connie Stevens. The “sixteen reasons why I love you” included things like “your freckled nose” and “your crazy clothes”. Way back then, I used to think what a dumb song it was. I promised myself that if I grew up to be a songwriter, I could think of far deeper reasons to love someone than their freckles or what they were wearing on a particular day. I used to see Connie Stevens on “The Tonight Show”, and I just couldn’t imagine why anyone would care who she was. But that was then. I heard that same song replayed on the radio a few weeks ago, and I wish they would have played it five times. The record has improved over the years, because I now realize it actually has a tune, and there are no obscene lyrics in it. As I listened to it, I thought that if Connie Stevens herself (who must be pushing 70 by now) materialized in the room, I would be inclined to give her a hug, not because she was ever great, but thank heavens, she was never awful.

I’m writing this on February 4, 2005. Yesterday was the 46th anniversary of “the day the music died”. But music didn’t really die when Buddy Holly did. In fact, it flourished for quite a few years after that. Today is also the 22nd anniversary of the untimely death of Karen Carpenter. Karen had a rare and wonderful gift, perhaps the most feminine voice which ever reached vinyl. Tragically, it turns out that she also had a “gift” for self-destruction–not just the run of the mill tendency toward self-destruction, but an unusual and very negative type of self-destruction. Honestly, I would rather have a relative become a drug addict than an anorexic, because I can’t even conceive of a moment’s pleasure in anorexia. But my point here is that Karen Carpenter has become a metaphor for the entire music industry–something rare and beautiful which has methodically destroyed itself.

When I originally posted this on February 4, 2005, I had no idea that the greatest number of upcoming grammys in 2005 would be won by the late Ray Charles, which only proves my point that the music industry ought to be more concerned about producing good new music and less concerned about Napster, which I never had the slightest desire to use. The music industry’s profits aren’t decreasing because people are stealing songs on the internet, but because the music industry is mass-producing dreadful junk.

Some will argue that even if popular music has become a vast wasteland, there are other forms of music. Believe it or not, the first music I really liked as a child was country music, so it might be natural to suppose that I could get interested in contemporary country music. Once in a while, I’ll hear something contemporary that I like, but it’s rare, and even when it happens, the disc jockeys never mention the song title or the artist anymore. If they don’t think it’s good enough to promote it, why should I buy it?

I enjoy classical music from time to time, but the world just isn’t mass-producing new Mozarts these days. Unfortunately, classical music isn’t very accessible to the average listener. If one wants to hear something new (at least to the listener), it has to be heard from the beginning to be understood and appreciated. It’s easy to turn on a concerto in the middle, but does anyone know when one is going to start?

So how about modern jazz? Well, it’s not really terrible, but a steady diet of it begins to sound really dreary, and after about 20 minutes I would much rather hear the Drifters sing “On Broadway” again. So I turn back to the oldies station, and I try to forget that I’m really a little bit tired of that, too.

One other point is worth making about the recorded music industry. There would be much more live music around us, if it weren’t for the din of pre-recorded music everywhere. I grew up in Albuquerque, where there used to be a chain of restaurants called Furs Cafeteria. Aside from being able to order any type of food I wanted at Furs, one of the great joys of going there was to be able to sit and listen to a live pianist who played standards and requests. Since my childhood, the number of places with live music has decreased significantly, because pre-recorded music makes live music expensive and unnecessary. As a result, there are fewer and fewer opportunities for good musicians to become great musicians, and the music industry flounders in a sespool of mediocrity because of it.

Someone might suggest that even if most of what’s on the radio is boring, there must still be good music in churches. But even there, I feel disappointed. Traditional hymns with deep theological lyrics and multiple verses, which used to be sung occasionally to the accompaniment of pianos and organs, have been replaced by ear-piercing, one-verse choruses with much less theology and less meaningful lyrics. Worse than that, most church services include the same half-dozen songs every week. Once a set of drums is brought into a church, every other instrument has to be amplified to coincide with the drums, and the result is that the church is by far the loudest part of my week, except for the unavoidable boom box encounters. Worse than that, most churches also have loud pre-recorded music blaring from the loudspeakers, before and after services, which prevents anyone in their congregation from speaking to each other or getting acquainted. I have argued with pastors about this for 25 years, to no avail. They say, “God likes all kinds of music, even if you don’t.” But they don’t play all kinds of music, they play one kind of music, as loudly and repetitiously as possible. Admittedly, part of my frustration is that I’m tired of the loudness of our culture, and that loudness always prevails over quieter things. But I’m also irritated by how determined Christians are to abandon the traditions of their forefathers. In the church my family attends, they rarely sing Christmas carols, even in December. And singing the same songs every week is a bit like saying the rosary 32 times in a row. I can’t imagine that God could enjoy the same lack of variety in prayers or music every Sunday. In the 1980s, I attended a church where they used to sing, “I am a wounded soldier” every Sunday morning. Am I supposed to feel obligated to come in wounded every week? Some things just aren’t appropriate every Sunday.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Perhaps there’s a natural progression from “turn it up” to “turn it off, please.” “If I had a hammer”, I would know what to do with all of the world’s boom boxes. “Where have all the flowers gone, and when will they ever learn?”