Category Archives: Culture views

“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.