Category Archives: Culture views

This week we mark the twentieth anniversary of the appointment of Justice Clarence Thomas as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.  Judge Thomas was thoroughly “borked”, a verb now in common usage after the savage hearings that brutalized the eminently qualified Robert Bork and refused him his appointment to the Supreme Court.  Justice Thomas survived the liberal vitriol and personal attacks of tumultuous Senate confirmation hearings to become one of the best respected ‘originalist’ voices for strict constitutional interpretation of American law.   He succeeded Thurgood Marshall and as an African American conservative continues to be a lightning rod for the left.

After serving as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Ronald Reagan, he was appointed first as a Federal judge on the Washington, DC Circuit Court of Appeals, then to the Supreme Court by President George H. W. Bush. For twenty years he has served with distinction and hopefully will continue to do so for another twenty.

In his autobiographical, “My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir”, Justice Thomas writes eloquently about his young life when he learned about personal responsibility and persistent work from his grandfather, as well as the value of education from the nuns at parochial schools in Savannah, GA.  His earliest language was Gullah, an African dialect spoken by his parents, descendents of slaves.  He went on to Holy Cross College and Yale Law School.  His spoken English now is evocative of the powerful cadences of James Earl Jones after disciplining himself for many hours in college language labs when a Jesuit professor and mentor warned his brilliant student that the Southern patois of his youth would limit his opportunities.  Justice Thomas at his core fervently believes in equal opportunity for all citizens and in the hard work necessary to take advantage of them.

As a strict interpreter of the original intent of the writers of the Constitution, he reserves special disdain for those laws which use race as a determinant of results such as affirmative action.  He has called the culture of affirmative action and racial biases favoring minorities by lowering standards for them as the modern version of the old slave holding plantation.  In Adarand v. Pena (1995) striking down racial quotas in government contracting, he wrote, affirmative action is “racial paternalism” whose “unintended consequences can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of discrimination.”  The unexpressed presumption in this condescending racism is that minorities cannot achieve equal results without props and winks.  For a person of Justice Thomas’ achievements, this is particularly galling.

Shelby Steele, an African American author, scholar and documentary film maker, is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute and another conservative opponent of all things racist, with racism being defined as treating people differently because of their race.  Professor Steele is widely published, and his book “White Guilt” is the best exposition of the case against affirmative action I’ve read.  In peril of my sounding too “sixties”, “White Guilt” is full of those consciousness raising ideas that forever change one’s preconceptions.  His writing is clear and alive, not pedantic or pompous as some academic works can be; I commend “Grandfather’s Son” and “White Guilt” most highly to anyone looking for well thought out counterpoint to politically correct jargon about race.

To presume a very brief synopsis of “White Guilt”: after the Civil Rights Act in 1964, by  admitting of the terrible wrongs throughout prior American history done by  whites towards blacks, whites diminished greatly their moral authority  necessary to continue to lead and govern.  To address this loss and threat to power, rather than encouraging blacks  to earn the breakthroughs codified by law in their new found equal rights and opportunities,  whites attempted to preempt the moral high ground by a series of actions  starting with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation.  The “Great Society” promoted guaranteed equal  results, including affirmative action and a debilitating welfare program that  systematically undermined black family life.  Black leaders like Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton chose to  leverage white guilt by espousing a self serving victimization attitude for  blacks, by identifying themselves through their race rather than their accomplishments  and by viewing the self sacrifice of personal responsibility necessary for  permanent gains as a further oppression rather than freeing.  In terms of lasting impact on the black  community, the net results have been decline with negligible impact on black  poverty and truly awful impact on black families.

The  statistics are condemning.  In 1960, 22%  of black children lived in single parent family homes; today 66% do, and 80% of black  children will spend a significant portion of their youth not in contact at all  with their fathers.  The sad facts are  these:  black male irresponsibility  enabled by the Great Society programs after fifty years has resulted in 53% of  black males dropping out of high school.  In NYC, there is a 72% drop out rate.  If a person takes three specific actions, only 8% of them will end up  below the poverty line.  They must  graduate from high school, not have a baby before they are married, and not  have a baby before they are 20 years old.  If they don’t do all three, 79% will be in poverty.

We need to  listen to Shelby Steele and Clarence Thomas, not Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton,  if we ever hope to see the equality and opportunity enshrined in our Declaration  of Independence enacted for all of us, irrespective of race.

Quote from “White Guilt”:  “No worse fate could befall a group emerging from oppression than to find itself gripped by a militancy that sees justice in making others responsible for its advancement.”

Human vision receptors respond to the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum; wave lengths array along that spectrum from longer than tall buildings to as infinitesimal as the span of the nuclei of atoms.  Our visible spectrum is a tiny segment that falls between the longer length infrared and the shorter ultraviolet. Our slice’s wavelength is somewhat smaller than the diameter of most cells.  Some species (like bees to find nectar) see more deeply into the ultraviolet range; some like pit vipers see into the infrared to help hunt warm blooded prey.  I would suggest that the limited range of our human vision is an apt metaphor.  Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Our view of the political spectrum from my perspective is extremely narrow.  Human government ranges from enormous and ubiquitous to non-existent:  from terrible tyranny to mere anarchy.  In our current view we’ve not only limited the discussion to what is currently in vogue, but slid our republic, our representative democracy a notch or two to the left.  The far left of the entire spectrum is tyranny, the far right is anarchy.  The ‘large government’ versus ‘small government’ discussion is significant. Government’s intrusion into our lives is an important debate, however if we misplace our markers along the spectrum, we miss some important points.  The common wisdom that a republic resides comfortably between the socialist left and the dictatorships of the right is erroneous. One of the victories of the left in the semantics of public discourse on the nature of government is this misplacement.  As in many dialogues, the definer of the terms makes it difficult for the other side of the pro/con divide.

Those on the right of representative democracy are not Nazis, as is often charged.   Nazis reside to the left.  In fact the very word “Nazi” derives from “Nationalsozialist” from the “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartie” or National Socialist German Worker’s Party.  Adolph Hitler was a big government guy; his moral opponents were democratic and religious.  His most bitter enemy on the despotic end of the government spectrum was also of the left – the communists of Josef Stalin.  Both Stalin and Hitler murdered millions of innocents in the name of the ‘greater good’ of their twisted veins of human created utopia.  For the communists, the shibboleth was the ascendancy of ‘the people’ (as in ‘power to the people’) and lip service towards radical egalitarianism.  Of course, the redistribution of wealth must be ruthlessly enforced with overwhelming governmental power overseen by elite masters, who with diabolic genius propagandize their self justification.  For the Nazis, the distinguishing feature of their brand of tyranny was racial supremacy and nationalism.  Their stated ends were very different; their methods and results remarkably similar.

Another limited, tunnel vision of human life occurs in the realm of the supernatural world within our ‘visible’ spectrum.  Guy Crouchback, the Catholic protagonist in Evelyn Waugh’s Second World War trilogy, in his cups one night expresses it well to his Army Anglican chaplain in “Men at Arms”:  “Do you agree that the Supernatural Order is not something added to the Natural Order, like music or painting, to make everyday life more tolerable?  It is everyday life.  The supernatural is real; what we call “real” is a mere shadow, a passing fancy.”  Like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we attribute reality to the shadows projected on the wall and miss the light behind them.

George Weigel, the noted  scholar and biographer of John Paul II, depicts a world without God, without a life beyond the limitations of our finite human flesh, as a world hermetically sealed without windows or doors.  The search for that light, that opening and light behind the perceived reality, I would suggest, is the most critical search of our lives.  In fact all else dims to the nothingness we face (and would become) absent this light.

St. Augustine: “Nos fecisti ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te: You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”.  Again, Augustine writes: “Therefore, do not seek to understand in order to believe, rather believe that thou may understand.”  All of us, gentle and good friends, face one inevitability.  This life will pass, or rather this phase of our lives will pass.  Our health will fail, age will defeat us, and our work will remain undone.  The only question worth asking is “Quo vadis?”  Where are you going?

Sam to Frodo in “Lord of the Rings”, “I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into?”

I told a Yankee fan friend of mine earlier this week that the blog wouldn’t speak of how the Red Sox dramatically augured into the September earth – the worst September crash in Major League history.  An unexpected and welcome visit from another  friend convinced me otherwise, though we barely spoke of baseball.  Tito Francona, the widely acknowledged best ever manager of the Sox for eight years and breaker of the “Curse of the Bambino,” is known as a friend of the players.  In the end, friendship was insufficient, and the authority born of respect was needed.

Francona and the owners agreed on Friday that he would “seek other opportunities”.  Many fans are saddened but agree; his time at Fenway had run its course.  In his final press conference a weary Tito said the team needed a “new voice”.  He seemed crushed by his powerlessness to inspire spoiled players to do what was necessary.  Petty, whining complaints accrued; some pitchers continued to drink beer in the clubhouse during the games after being directed to stop.  Even the Red Sox Nation beloved “Big Papi” acted out like an entitled adolescent earlier in the year by breaking into a pre-game press conference and publically insisting on Francona talking to him right here, right now about some imagined slight with several ‘expletives deleted’ in front of the cameras.

The complexity of coaching multi millionaire twenty something celebrity athletes is well documented; hardly a week goes by without a sports news headline of drug use, bar fights, spousal abuse, dugout rifts or the sad exhibit of some fallen demigod lying to a Congressional subcommittee.  At the risk of over extrapolating, athletes are not exempt from membership in the “Peter Pan” post war generations; the money and the fame make their embarrassments more public than most, but they are not atypical – simply more enabled.  Louise Bogan, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, with her own extremely troubled life, wrote, “But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.”

The “Boys of Summer” are not the role models and champions we hoped they would be, but are, in the end, merely boys with a lot of disposable income.

My friend, Rick, believes adolescents running the asylum harkens back to the French Revolution, when “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” ran rampant and blood ran in the streets.  License and lack of restraint tragically substituted for Liberté.  Fraternité turned out to be pack mentality with ill thought out ends and means, not unrelated to modern gangs and mall rats.  Égalité morphed into radical egalitarianism, which disdained all authority.

He related to me another friend’s lament about the almost impossible challenge of current schools. To paraphrase (and I am probably not exact):  the teachers are afraid of the students; the administrators are afraid of the teachers (and their union); the administrators are afraid of the school board; the school board is afraid of the voters and parents; the parents are afraid of their children, the students.

The children are running the schools, and the adults have fled the premises.  I know many (and am a father to two) teachers.  While they do not like much of what the union promulgates, they look on their union representative as their last protection against fearful administrators and litigious parents, who almost invariably back up their children and distrust the teacher’s side of the story.  Teachers cannot discipline even the most egregious offenses without fear of career ruining repercussions from parents and administrators.

Ironically, teachers are frequently obliged to fulfill the parent’s role, which has been abdicated by numerous parents, who are more friend than father to their children.  The high rate of teacher burn out is inevitable, and too many teachers with no heart, energy, life and imagination left, live only for the blessed day of their own entitled retirement.  The teachers who persevere, who love, who pour out their heart, energy, life, intelligence and imagination for 180 days a year are the champions and role models, worthy of gratitude from all of us.  To a great degree our society is in their hands.

Robert Browning:

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

Lately, in the early morning, we can hear Canadian geese, and this week I saw several large flocks overhead flying south, resolute and well focused.  The geese mate for life in their second year and breed in the north, unlike humans in our time: our youth tend now to change partners frequently and fly south to Fort Lauderdale or South Beach to find new ones.  This may well be progress, but hardly an upgrade.   I digress.

 In times past harbingers of the coming winter promised a respite, shorter days – a time to mend nets and harnesses, sharpen and repair tools; perhaps read a bit more by oil lamps.  Fond nostalgia for the supposed simpler times bring to mind St. Augustine’s caution that those who pine for the life of past centuries didn’t have to live in them.  Each age carries its own burden: its own blessing and curse.  Ours is designated the “Information Age”, and it is aptly named. How we will adapt to “Too Much Information” is an open question.  We expend millions of hours Facebooking, Googling, Tweeting, emailing and, yes, blogging.  Our worldview can be defined by our choices:  Fox News or Huffington Post; WSJ or NYT; The Nation or National Review.  News sources have expanded almost exponentially, and not a day goes by when our jobs, our home life and our peace are not careening about new bits and bytes.  Our attention is bounced cruelly among so many issues, most of which we can do very little to affect.

Global Jihad, global climate change, plummeting net worth and security for most of us when the thin walls of the housing bubble gave out, economic and financial crises everyday for companies and countries, rising energy costs, train wrecks, airline crashes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, murders and mayhem live in full color, big pharma – medical community collusion and corruption, health care options and costs, public union and lawmaker mutual parasitism with its ruinous costs to the taxpayer, taxes too high and too diverse and too hidden, too much asked of burned out teachers, wars and rumors of war, unfunded pension liabilities both public and private which may never be paid out, venal and vain legislators and presidents concerned mainly with keeping their jobs, 10,000 Baby Boomers entering Medicare a day – for the next 19 years, a drained and grossly inadequate Social Security trust fund, checks our politicians have written that we can’t cash, a dearth of courageous leadership at every level, crumbling family structures, collapsed Western birth rates and a losing demographic battle with Islam in Europe, links from all manner of drugs and behaviors to new and exotic fatal diseases, the risk and potential of the Arab Spring, wild fires in an overheated Texas, exaggerated shrinking ice coverage in Greenland, more frequent solar flares that may, indeed, be the main cause of the rise in global temperature, potholes, mistimed traffic lights, increasing public crassness and diminished civility, a ‘magic number’ of four to make the playoffs with five games to play, fifty five hour workweeks and four nights of meetings or games and dance classes for the kids and a thousand more matters both profound and trivial. How we long for simpler times and have absolutely no idea how to recreate them.  The genie has long since escaped the bottle.

So many of the solutions of which we often despair are to be found within ourselves.  A winter respite, whether or not it resides in cold, snowy weather and long nights, is to be found in personal grace and personal quiet.  The word “grace” originates in the Latin, “gratia” and “gratus” meaning favor, gratitude, charm and gift.  Grace holds many distinct definitions today:  a disposition to or an act of kindness; a special favor; a reprieve; a charming characteristic; ease and  suppleness of bearing; a sense of propriety; a short prayer of thanks or blessing; a state of sanctification; and unmerited divine assistance or gift of virtue.  Hemingway defined courage as “grace under pressure”.  All of these merit reflection and apply to this discussion.

Limiting our compulsion to follow every story to seek out every factoid and merciless, overwhelming detail means making time each day to quiet ourselves, reflect on the many gifts in our lives, including our life itself, and finding within ourselves gratitude for each of them.

St. Augustine wrote in his Sermon to Pastors about how good shepherds will guide their flock, “And their grazing ground shall be there, that is, the place where they will rest, where they will say: “I am happy”; where they will say: “It is true, it is clear, we are not deceived.”

From Psalm 131

O Lord, my heart is not proud

nor haughty my eyes.

I have not gone after things too great

nor marvels beyond me.

Truly I have set my soul

in silence and peace.

As a child has rest in its mother’s arms,

even so my soul.

The New York Times (as reported in National Review) ran a story on mothers of twins who decided to abort one baby and keep the other child.  Here is a direct quote from one mother, who conceived after six years of fertility treatment, “If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it.  But we created this child in such an artificial manner—in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed inside me—and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice.  The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

A baby, any baby or fetus on either side of a journey through the birth canal is utterly dependent for their very life on oxygen, nutrition, warmth and protection provided by the parent(s).  The timing of the decision about when or if to love this child currently determines the baby’s fate.  When the sperm and egg unite, in that instant of unique genetic fusion, the child is defined in many, many aspects, from gender to ethnicity to the color of her eyes.  What follows for the rest of her life is development, some of it just happens to be inside the mother’s womb.  The demarcation line crossed from potential human to fully human takes place at her conception, not on her brief trip from womb to breast.

We can have reasonable discussions about moral truths among people of good faith, even about one with such an unbridgeable gap as abortion.  I have had these discussions with those who truly deny the humanity of the human fetus and value the “rights” of the mother as displacing utterly those of the child.  In a spirit of full disclosure, I see this rejection of science and history as akin to flat earthers, 9/11 truthers and holocaust deniers.  These denials, to me, are ignorance, either blinded by cultural indoctrination, ideological commitment or deliberate by perceived necessity, but ignorance nonetheless.

Let me suggest an alternative worldview to the mother of the former twins, or rather let the poet, Galway Kinnell, describe it from his work, “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”   (Link to full poem: After Making Love We Hear Footsteps– back arrow to return to this post).

– as now, we lie together,

after making love, quiet, touching along the length of 

 our bodies,

familiar touch of the long-married,

and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,..

and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles

            himself  to sleep,

his face gleaming with satisfaction at being  this very

            child.

 In the half darkness we look at each other

and smile

and touch arms across his little,  startlingly muscled

body—

this one whom habit of memory propels to  the ground

            of  his making,

sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing  awake,

this blessing loves gives again into our arms.

We can  disagree reasonably (or unreasonably) about what abortion is and does, but I  cannot envision thinking and honest persons who believe that, “If I had  conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy…The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with”  is not a step towards the abyss, and that this reduction does not diminish us all.

Ezekiel 12:1:  They have ears to see, but do not see, and ears to hear, but do not hear.

“We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”  There are several versions of this oft quoted adage.  Wikiquote suggests it is usually incorrectly attributed to George Orwell and may originate with Winston Churchill, although Orwell expressed a similar idea in his “Notes on Nationalism”.  In the movie, “A Few Good Men”, Jack Nicholson portrays Colonel Nathan Jessup brilliantly, but in a negative light.  His speech resonates:  On the wall   (Use back arrow to return from links.)

Rudyard Kipling in “Tommy” reproves those who may tear down the contribution of our warriors, “Yes, making mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep”.  Sometimes the left intelligentsia disparage with clever arrogance those who guard our lives and freedom.  I have no interest in futile quarrelling with those weary and specious arguments, nor do I want to get mired in awkward politically correct gender neutral foolishness.  Let’s stipulate that “men” in this post refers to all those dedicated to our defense, both male and female.

“Rough” seems a woefully inadequate adjective to illuminate the complex nature of the men who serve our country today on the tenth anniversary of the September 11^th terrorist attack that murdered almost 3,000 of us.  Dore Gilbert is the father of Marty Gilbert, the future husband of my youngest daughter, Meg; Dore is a successful physician in the Laguna area of Southern California.  Last year he enlisted in the Army to do what he could do to help the military he so admires.  Dore, a former college football player, remains remarkably fit for a man entering his seventh decade.  He is now deployed with the Massachusetts National Guard in Afghanistan as a Lt. Colonel responsible for the well being of around 8,000 military men. His son, Kevin, is also in Afghanistan serving as a Marine in harm’s way.   Every so often, Dore sends out a private email blog; he graciously gave me permission to share it.

Here is the closing paragraph of his most recent post:  This is serious business and I am very confident based on the level of professionalism I have seen so far.  I doubt there is any other country in the world that could carry on both a war against despicable people and a humanitarian effort to help less fortunate at the same time.  We are building schools, hospitals, infrastructure and partnering with the Afghans in law, professional police forces and an army for self defense.  What a colossal effort.   I love my country.

His whole post is entitled “What do we do with sinks and toilets?”  It is well worth your time to read and is posted here:  What do we do with sinks and toilets

 Here also are some pictures he sent, as well as one sent to me by a friend  taken by his son Dan, currently serving as a helicopter gunship pilot in Afghanistan. 

Gunship View of an Afghan Village

 While Dore is not your typical recruit, he exemplifies many who have put their lives on hold and at risk on our behalf.  All come with the same imperfections and messy history that every human being carries, and every one of them is deeply imbued with the dignity of the individual human person – all singular, all a first time and forever unique creation, all with varied motivations, intellects, abilities and personalities: Each one an irreplaceable treasure and on occasion an irretrievable loss.

“A Few Good Men” is a better descriptive than “rough”.  “Good” in spite of or perhaps because of the very human flaws they share with all of us.  Abigail Adams, our second First Lady, wrote to her friend Mercy Otis Warren after the Battle of Trenton following the disastrous defeats for the Continental Army in Brooklyn and Fort Washington.  Trenton and the crossing of the Delaware River on a frigid December night was a pivotal moment in American history.  Indeed without Trenton, there may have been no American history.  She wrote of the commander, George Washington, but I think her letter applies to all who serve their country.  In her letter she quoted the poet, Edward Young, “Affliction is the good man’s shining time.”  May God bless and protect the good men who keep us safe in their time of affliction.  Please keep a moment of quiet reflection and prayer for every one of them today.

We shall  not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of  battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.  Give us the tools and we will finish the job.
Winston Churchill

I am an unapologetic and unrepentant Boston Red Sox fan.  Loyalty to a ball club is bequeathed from parents to children like fondness for Italian opera.  Rare is the son or daughter who strays too far from the father in this regard.  “The Boys of Summer” transport us with an annual rite of grace; hot, languid afternoons, heroics, heartbreaks and for Red Sox lovers, Fenway Park – that odd “bandbox” park of the tall green monster and uncomfortable seats no true fan ever wants replaced by some artificially turfed, cushioned, Disneyworld of an entertainment palace with naming rights acquired by a bank or a beer and designed with all the charmless sameness of a McMansion.

My siblings and I grew up with the folklore of Ted Williams and a legacy of the abiding discontent of over three quarters of a century of failure.  My father lived all his life in a hope renewed each spring that was frustrated each autumn or summer, usually by August, but with a few heart stopping excursions into October.  The Impossible Dream in 1967 with Yaz’s MVP year just missed in a seven game World Series with the Cardinals with future Hall of Famers Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, Lou Brock and Orlando Cepeda.  A second seven game loss in 1975 is rated the second greatest World Series in history.  The Sox of Fred Lynn, Jim Rice, Carlton Fisk and Luis Tiant came up short to the legendary Big Red Machine from Cincinnati with Hall of Famers Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan along with Ken Griffey and series MVP Pete Rose.

The agony culminated in 1986 with the MLB rated third greatest game in history when the Sox lost the seemingly won Game 6 of the World Series in the tenth inning with Bill Buckner’s famous error.  Game 7 was doomed.  Seems like last summer: the stuff of myth.  1986 would have been too late anyway for my father.  My dad cheered unrequited for 66 years and died with 22 years yet to go before the Sox broke the curse of the Bambino.

My father took us once to see a fishing trade show even though he never fished to my knowledge.  We went to see a retired Ted Williams cast a fly unerringly time after time into a small floating ring in a large swimming pool.  He told us of Teddy’s hitting prowess and astonishing eye hand coordination – a God given talent far beyond most mortals, and an ability that downed many an enemy plane when Williams earned his Ace rating as a Marine pilot in WW II and the Korean conflict, sacrificing four years of stats and home runs.

Many times my father and his kids would do yard work or paint my mother’s greenhouse with the radio propped precariously in the kitchen window over the sink booming out an afternoon game.  At the risk of seeming irreverent, St. Augustine summed it up best when writing of the Psalms in his “Confessions”: “These voices poured into my ears and truth became clear in my heart and then feelings of devotion grew warm within me.”

At last in 2004 my wife, Rita, and Ethan, the young boy next door, broke the curse.  Rita brought Ethan, who was around 3 or 4, the gift of a Red Sox hat.  When she went to his house, there was a Yankee’s hat next to him on the couch.  She explained to him reasonably that the Yankees are the bad guys, and the Red Sox are the good guys.   Ethan was an instant and enthusiastic convert.  Being a resigned lifelong fan, I told her she had condemned him to a life of disappointment.  I was wrong.  At the end of the season, when the Sox came back in the playoffs from 0 and 3 to the Yankees, my father’s hope was realized.  Manny, Curt, Pedro, Big Papi, Johnny Damon and ‘Cowboy Up’ Kevin Millar became an inevitability, and the World Series sweep against the Cardinals seemed almost anticlimactic.

Baseball’s pace, the tension of every pitch in a close game, the strategy and dugout superstitions are intrinsic to its singular appeal.  In all other major professional games, the losers run out of time, but in baseball, they run out of opportunities.  Each contending team is guaranteed a minimum of 27 opportunities, and upon them rests success or catastrophe over 162 regular season games and as far into the playoffs as skill, heart and good fortune will take them. Something about that guaranteed opportunity makes baseball uniquely American.

You may be surprised that a genetic Red Sox fan made it all the way through a baseball blog posting with very little bad to be said about the Yankees.  True Red Sox fans steer clear of maligning their opponents no matter how deserving they are of scorn.

Bostonian Colonel Henry Knox (hero of the Guns of Ticonderoga and the siege of Boston) in a letter to his beloved Lucy in 1776 about New Yorkers:  “The people, why the people are magnificent in their carriages, which are numerous; in their house furniture, which is fine; in their pride and conceit, which is inimitable; in their profaneness, which is intolerable; in their want of principle which is prevalent, and in their Toryism (anti independence), which is insufferable.” 

In October of 1775, George III addressed both houses of the British Parliament to rally them to send forces of His Empire sufficient to compel His American colonies to obedience.  He referred to His freedom seeking subjects as a “desperate conspiracy”.  The word “desperate” derives from the Latin meaning “without hope”.  “Conspiracy” starts back in Latin as well, meaning “breathes together”.  George was right that the colonials aspiring to independence breathed together, committing their lives and treasure to each other and for liberty.  He was woefully wrong that they had no hope.

This hope was expressed in July of the following year by Thomas Jefferson when he cried out for the ages, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  The great experiment that is America was based on these rights.   We seem to have lost the thread.  The right to Life is trampled upon with the murder of more than 50 million pre-born innocents.  The right to Liberty is in jeopardy as many seem willing to lose it in a poor bargain for illusory security.  The right to the “pursuit of Happiness” has devolved into a hollow right to Happiness, not its pursuit.

In his anti-utopian 1932 novel, “Brave New World”, Aldous Huxley projects into the year 3450 and foresees a carefully controlled culture characterized by asexual, laboratory reproduction with genetic engineering and prenatal conditioning to craft human beings bred for their task and station in life.  A baleful aspect was the ‘happy’ drug, “Soma”.  “Soma” was mandated by a beneficent government for a bovine, compliant population from their perfectly planned birth in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre to the merciful end of their somnambulist lives.

Mustapha Mond, one of the World Controllers, receives an unsettling paper submitted by a ‘higher caste’ author who speculates that human life may, indeed, have a purpose.  Mond suppresses the paper with a grave concern.  “Once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose—well, you didn’t know what the results would be.  It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes –make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refinement of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.”

When Happiness becomes a right and the Sovereign Good, it portends catastrophe.  Much has been made of the financial implications of an entitlement society.  Margaret Thatcher: “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”  With the national debt at 97% of GDP causing the first ever S&P downgrading of that debt, the costs of such fiscal misadventures by the current administration are profoundly concerning.  However, we are superficial to demean only those who look to mother government to pay the bills; a deep spiritual malady is even more disturbing.

Happiness as the Sovereign Good incites distortion of human aspiration and virtue.   The signs are readily apparent.   Unrestrained hedonism is unabashedly pursued, indeed it is idolized; pleasure is a transcendent end unto itself.   We become obsessed with good times, parties, inane entertainments, ‘reality’ television diversion, sports increasingly bizarre and violent, widespread recreational chemicals of every stripe, a medical community overprescribing  “Soma” at every turn, adrenaline jacking thrill seeking, trivializing and normalizing all manner of aberrant sexuality, pornography increasingly graphic and demeaning, ubiquitous celebrity worship, narcissism and an absolute compulsion to remain forever young.  We liposuction, tummy tuck, manically work out, Botox and face lift.  We fear frown lines and liver spots more than we fear wasting unreflective lives.  The “maintenance of well-being”, which we claim as our due, is a vapid, joyless gloom.

Our noble American experiment is in danger of degrading from a “desperate conspiracy” to a truly desperate dying social structure with acutely disconnected citizens stumbling along wondering what is the point of all this?  With happiness as an entitlement, hope is stillborn.

We can address the financial costs of an entitlement culture with legislation or with elections, if we have the will for it.  The underlying basis for the expectation that drives it is much more difficult to diagnose and to remedy.  The purposeless life requires no sacrifice, no suffering; after all, happiness is a birthright owed to us.  The pursuit of happiness on the other hand is inextricable from life, liberty, sacrifice, suffering, deferred gratification and commitment to future generations.  The solution to the diseased root of an entitlement culture is spiritual and won family by family, heart by heart and mind by mind.

From Psalm 84 (NAB)

They are happy, whose strength is in You,

in whose hearts are the roads to Zion.

As they go through the Bitter Valley

they make it a place of springs.

Occasionally certain characters cross our trail, and they pull us up short with demeanor that hints of the dignity and value bestowed upon every human being.  Simplicity, constancy and good natured humor set them apart, not because they are extraordinary, but because we may have wandered off the path.

We recently needed some patio repair; in truth we needed patio replacement after years of procrastination: the task seemed too daunting for do-it-myself home improvement.  After researching the neighborhood, we located the craftsman who had done a job  similar to what we wanted done several years ago on a property a couple of streets over.  We agreed on a price, selected the stone and made a deal. Three days later, Selvin showed up with his crew of two and began the demo.  He had lived in Rhode Island for almost ten years after eleven years in Southern California, but he was born in Guatemala where much of his family remains.

For the better part of two weeks with weather delays, they labored.  The demolition and excavation of brick and concrete, followed by the skillful laying down of six inches of gravel base and an additional two inches of stone dust took six days – six hot days.  Carefully leveled with a slight pitch away from the house, the prep work assured me of quality.  The preparation completed, he began setting hundreds of stones in a precise pattern.  The intelligence and experience that went into the planning and problem  solving was apparent. Each stone, placed exactly, was pounded into place with a dozen strokes of his rubber mallet one by one for three days.

Selvin, who is around fifty years old, led the crew with no doubt about who was in charge but with much laughter, frequent breaks for water and clear care for their welfare; he reserved most of the hardest work for himself.  The constant, repetitive hammering became emblematic to us of centuries of skilled, steady work that built our cities and homes.  Like our Irish, Italian and Portuguese forbears who immigrated to America, these men spent their strength, talent and youth in hard, physical work, valuing the freedom of America to provide opportunity for their children.  But there was more than that.

Near the end of the first week, his truck showed up one morning full of packed cases, a small bicycle and several wheelchairs of varied provenance.  They unloaded them against my neighbor’s house in my driveway to use the truck to bring in last of the gravel and haul off the debris.  I jokingly asked him if he was expecting a real bad day for the crew.  He smiled at my lame joke. What he told me opened a window into his reality and mine.

The wheelchairs and the truck were headed to Guatemala at the end of the day to benefit the village of his birth, where his parents still lived.  Selvin explained that wheelchairs were almost impossible to obtain in his village and much was needed.  His friend was going to take ten days to drive there; the truck would be left behind to be traded for a new home for his parents.  He finished our contract with a rented truck.

Our parents or grandparents or great grandparents were all hopeful immigrants.  The ceaseless debates about immigration policy and safe borders are worth having and resolving, but the certainty is that human beings will endure much to safeguard their families and improve the lives of their children.  Selvin reminded me of the simple truth concerning the dignity of work and faithfulness of intelligent, loving families willing themselves to persevere their entire lives for the good of others.  Many of us talk of simplicity as an ideal; few of us live it like Selvin.

Psalm 131 (NAB translation)

O Lord, my heart is not proud

nor haughty my eyes.

I have not gone after things too great

nor marvels beyond me.

Truly I have set my soul

In silence and peace

As a child has rest in its mother’s arms,

even so my soul.

O Israel, hope in the Lord

both now and forever.