Category Archives: Culture views

On Good Friday in April of 1865, the guard on duty outside the Presidential box, John Parker, took advantage of the time President and Mrs. Lincoln would be watching the play, “Our American Cousin”, to descend the back stairs of Ford’s Theatre to the adjacent Tatavul’s saloon and ordered a tankard of ale.  At the other end of the bar sat John Wilkes Booth, building his courage with a whiskey after completing his preparations. The assassin left the tavern, and as a celebrity actor strode unimpeded through the theatre.

Booth slipped into the unguarded dark corridor leading to State Box in Ford’s Theatre.  Timing his arrival to coincide with the funniest line of the play, he hoped the laughter of the audience would cover any commotion before he took his shot.  Booth checked through the small hole he had bored in the wooden partition earlier in the day and saw the back of the president’s head.  Silently he pushed back the unlatched door, extended his arm and discharged his derringer.  The ½” ball smashed into Lincoln’s skull just behind his left ear, traversed his brain and stopped just shy of exiting near his right eye.  President Lincoln slumped forward in his chair without a cry and died the next morning across the street in the commandeered bedroom of a boarding house with his wife Mary in the next room still in the clothes stained with her husband’s blood.

Booth’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and Lewis Powell, were not as lethal.  Powell forced his way into the home of Secretary of State William Sewell, and with his Bowie knife repeatedly slashed the bed ridden Sewell.  After a long recovery Sewell lived.  The hapless Atzerodt was too drunk to go to Vice President Andrew Johnson’s room at the Kirkwood House.  Only Booth accomplished his part in their deadly conspiracy to destroy the top three positions in the Executive Branch of the government.  Booth was never tried and was shot through the spine while resisting capture; he died at 26.

With the survival of the barely educated Andrew Johnson from Tennessee, the aftermath of the Civil War was dramatically altered and America’s “Reconstruction” followed a bad turn.  Lincoln had made clear his intentions of leniency and reconciliation, planning to use the balance of his final term in office to lead the country through healing and opportunity for nine million freed slaves.  The brutal corruption of the “carpetbaggers” sanctioned by vengeful Congressmen and undeterred by the inept Johnson sealed in the bitter resentment of the former Confederates and the ascendency of the Klu Klux Klan.  Embedded racism and Jim Crow laws persisted for another century.  A deep wound did not heal.  What could have been had President Lincoln lived can never be known.

Ninety eight years later in November of 1963, another president fell, but this time to a lone assassin, the troubled Lee Harvey Oswald.  A former U.S. Marine with a history of court-martials, Oswald returned from a three year defection in the Soviet Union with a Russian wife and child.  He hoped to emigrate again, this time to Cuba for another try at a “purer” version of socialist utopia, but Cuba examined his record and rejected him.  In April of 1963, Oswald missed with a sniper shot at retired General Edwin Walker, hitting the window frame in Walker’s home office.  He was never a suspect until after Dallas.  Oswald got a job at the Texas Book Depository in Dallas.

Lee Harvey Oswald brought an inexpensive, 6.5 caliber mail order, bolt action Carncano scoped rifle to work the day the route of President Kennedy’s well publicized motorcade was to pass in front of the Book Depository.  Oswald set up in a sixth floor window in a nearly deserted section of the warehouse and waited.

His first shot passed through President Kennedy’s neck, probably not fatal, and seriously wounded Texas Governor John Connally, sitting in the front seat of their convertible limo.  The second shot missed.  The confused driver inexplicably slowed the limo.  The third shot slammed into the president’s head, tearing out massive portions of his brain and skull.  He was rushed to Parkland Hospital, but President Kennedy was certainly instantaneously brain dead.   Oswald later in the day murdered Dallas policeman J.D. Tippitt when Tippitt exited his patrol car to question Oswald.  He was never tried and after his capture was gut shot in jail by Dallas strip club owner and police hanger on, Jack Ruby; Oswald died at 24.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a former Texas Senator, was sworn in on the plane that carried the President’s body before it headed back to Washington.  Kennedy’s wife Jacqueline stood next to Johnson still in the clothes stained with her husband’s blood.

President Kennedy had spoken of pulling back from Vietnam and was a fiscal conservative. Johnson escalated the Vietnam War and ushered in the Great Society welfare entitlement that debilitated the minority population for the next fifty years.  The war and the subsequent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy five years later precipitated a generation of disillusionment, discontent and dilettante revolution, the repercussions of which ripple down to this day.  What could have been had President Kennedy lived can never be known.

Quote attributed to a homily from St. Marcarius (fourth century Egyptian monk):

“When a house has no master living in it, it becomes dark, vile and contemptible…. Woe to the house where no master dwells, to the field where no farmer works, to the pilotless ship, storm-tossed and sinking.”

Three seemingly unrelated stories in the last two weeks, on further reflection, seem to me inextricably entwined.  The Washington Post carried excellent coverage about the financial woes of our Social Security entitlement program.  For the first time in history, during 2010 Social Security went ‘cash negative’, spending more money than it took in.  Senate  President Harry Reid’s (D-Nevada) response was typical of the left, “Let’s worry about Social Security when it’s a problem.  Today, it is not a problem.”  Apparently the plan is to wait until the house is fully engulfed and the roof collapses, then call the fire department and try to save the foundation.

In 1940, there were 42 workers paying in for every one collecting.  In 1950, there were 16; in 2010 there were 2.8, and projections for 2030 are for 1.9 workers per retiree.  Those 1.9 should count on working long and hard.  In 1940, the average life expectancy was 62.8 years.  In 1950, it was 66.3, and in 2010, the average American will live until 80.  Most clearly, “Houston, we do have a problem.”

Social Security, according to those who know, is by far the easiest to fix among the big three entitlements: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  Raise the retirement age, index the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) to prices, not wages, perhaps privatize some of it, move up the contribution rate slightly or means test the benefit recipients or raise the contribution cap, and we are there.  The longer the corrections are postponed, the more draconian will be the necessary remedy.

The second story last week exacerbates the first:  the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in the United States dropped to 1.9 total births per fertile woman.  In 1960, the rate in the U.S. was around 3.6; in 2009, it was 2.05.  2.1 new births are necessary to sustain a population.   We postpone childbearing into our thirties and limit it to one or two children by and large; we live in a contraceptive society that frequently views children as either burdens or carefully protected and rare trophies.  When we factor in 53 million abortions in the U.S. since Roe v Wade and compare that to total employment of around 154 million and to economy growing consumers numbering 300 million, the implications for long term funding of retirement benefits become manifest.

The United States is following most of Europe into a spiral leading to an aging population incapable of supporting itself over time.  While sub-Saharan Africa and Muslim countries are exploding in population growth, the West declines.  (see link to CIA statistics on world wide TFR)  In Europe prospects are more barren still. France, like Japan and Canada, offers generous tax benefits and even payments to couples having children.  They are struggling up over 2.0 TFR with the incentives.  Greece and Italy have TFRs below 1.5, and they retire at younger ages.  Greece and Italy have crushing debt, and their bonds are on the brink of complete melt down.  There is the potential to devalue the Euro catastrophically and jeopardize the European Union itself.  Here we have Occupy Wall Street, which is bad enough. In Greece and Italy, faced with austerity measures that could cripple their debt supported standard of living, the well reasoned response has been full blown riots and burning, overturned cars.

Further complications: the Muslim population in Europe, which is a significant constituency already, has three times the birth rate of the native population.  Some European countries will have a Muslim majority at current trends before the middle of this century.

The final story adds a third perspective.  In Egypt, with the ascendency of radical Islam after the Arab Spring, life for the 8 million Coptic Christians, which was always hard, has become untenable.  Churches are bombed, massacres are threatened, and there are no Christians allowed in any leadership roles, including schools and government.  Under Mubarak, many times assaults on members of this ancient Christian sect were ignored.  Often the victims would be arrested as trouble makers, stifling the reporting of attacks.

Now he’s gone, and it’s gotten worse.  Harassment comes not just from radical Islamists, but most attacks originate from among the ordinary Muslim majority population over some imagined offense against Islam: a Coptic Church being renovated or built, the rumor of a sexual relationship between a Coptic man and a Muslim woman or just some perceived disrespect towards Islam from a Christian.  In October, a 17 year old Christian was told by his Muslim teacher to remove a cross he wore.  When he declined, the teacher began to beat him and was soon joined by the students.  The beating stopped when he died.

My suggestion is this:  If you are planning a visit to Florence or the Vatican while the Euro is cheap, sooner is better than later.  Michelangelo’s David will lose some of his cache with a robe on, and the Pieta will be nowhere to be found.  Ladies, get your burqa out of the cedar closet.

Allahu Akbar, anyone?

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?  T. S. Eliot

As the population of our planet increases, so does the quantity of goods and services provided.  According to a recent article in “The Economist”, 28% of all human years lived (cumulative by all people) since 1 AD were lived in the twentieth century.  23% of everything produced by all of humanity since the birth of Christ has been produced in the first ten years of the 21^st century. Exponential growth in the Gross Domestic Product of all nations has been driven by and continues to drive the ratcheted ever upward productivity of nations, competitive businesses and individuals.  But at a cost, and a cost we have yet to understand or adjust to.

Could the inventor of the telegraph, which revolutionized communication and required specialized operators, have envisioned the average modern home’s ability to instantly transmit for pennies and a few hours’ worth of learning not just text, but pictures, videos and sound?  The telegraph ended the jobs of thousands of message carriers and created fewer new ones.  Laser printers and copiers and fax machines displaced jobs as well as typewriters and carbon paper.  Now paperless offices and scanners and direct to e file record keeping will cut more jobs and render more skills to history with coopers and wheelwrights and stenographers.  The ease of spreadsheets with multiple “what ifs?” eliminated thousands, if not millions, of the jobs of financial analysts and bookkeepers. Very few futurists even attempt to foretell the coming effects of artificial intelligence and well programmed robots.

At each turn of the ratchet of productivity, fewer people are called upon to do more for far less expense per transaction.  But at a cost, and a cost we have yet to understand or adjust to.

I review (however cursorily), respond to, delete or file over 60 emails a day on average – some days many more.  Emails are layered on top of dozens of phone calls (landline and cell), text messages, a profusion of meetings and nearly constant interruption by folks just walking into or by my office.  I am not unusual and work in a primarily blue collar industry that by definition will always remain local to a great degree (construction and construction related products).  What primarily white collar, international business associates deal with is, I would assume, more intense.  Amongst the communications from customers, coworkers, bosses, subordinates, suppliers, sub contractors, architects and engineers is the obligation to produce the work fed by the communication – the reports, analysis, planning, new bids, and successful results.

We have become by necessity what is now a wan and enervated boast at the coffee pot as we replenish our caffeine levels – harried and frantic multi-taskers for ten or more hours a day, plus a couple of more on the phone to and from our workplace.  We are called upon to sustain the attention span of squirrels and survive on the ability to jump from branch to branch and acorn to acorn with alacrity and agility.

Yet the brain study scientists caution us that the human mind cannot strictly focus on more than one task or thought at a time.  Our own experience confirms that. So while we scan (or even write) emails and hold a phone conversation, only one of these tasks gets adequate attention, or for that matter, any attention.  We’ve all had the admonition of someone (occasionally wives, who know us so well) asking us impatiently, “are you on the computer?” while talking to us on the phone.  We sometimes forget things that are important and remember things that are not.

We drink from a severed water main, constantly adjusting our intake to seek equilibrium somewhere between dying of thirst and drowning in the torrent.  Our productivity has a cost, and we have not yet understood it or adjusted to it.  Our jobs, if we let ourselves sink, become as C.S. Lewis once wrote, “dust, grit, thirst and itch”.

Lest we despair, I offer the following:  if what we are doing is what we truly are called to do at this time in our lives, then we do others and ourselves a disservice by complaining about the unavoidable reality of that vocation.  We seek to value what we are called to do, and if we are doing it to the best of our ability and occasionally with joy, then we bring to each day some gratitude, kindness and a desire to end the day with a bit more wisdom than we began it.

Quote from the theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, later modified as the Serenity Prayer of the 12 Step Programs of AA:

“Lord, grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed; courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other. “

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