Category Archives: Culture views

Creating a firebreak is sweaty, sometimes risky work and especially dangerous in an emergency.  Crews crank up bulldozers, brush axes and chainsaws, even light backfires – anything to stop a wildfire from spreading further destruction onto fresh ground.  If the fire rushes too quickly upon the firefighters and fleeing panic stricken animals rush by, they have little choice but to run for their own lives or hunker down under emergency wild land fire shelters and hope they can keep breathing long enough for the fire to pass over them.  Other crews will be working again ahead of the fire to make a new firebreak to try and restrain the blaze.  A successful firebreak contains the devastation and preserves what remains.

If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.  Thomas Jefferson

An article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal entitled “America’s Baby Bust” by Jonathan Last tells of a different kind of consuming fire – one far more destructive.  United States citizens, like 97% of the rest of the world’s population now, live in a country with birth rates below a replacement threshold necessary to sustain itself – 2.1 births per woman.  We have not been consistently at a sustaining rate since the early 70’s; currently we are at 1.93 and dropping because the immigrant population, which was holding its own for a long time, has now followed those of us born here.  Among college educated women, the rate is 1.60 births per child bearing woman, about what it is in Japan overall.  China is in worse shape at a 1.54 rate after decades of a one child and forced abortion policy, exacerbated because of cultural bias with a young demographic heavily weighted male.  Japan has been at it longer and is in full blown panic.  Russia, Italy, France and Canada are all paying mothers large tax credits or even cash bounties for new babies.  By 2100, Japan will be half its current population.  Its once dazzling growth rate in GDP has ground to a halt.

Many of the economic and sociopolitical crises we face arise from a stagnant population.  A rapidly aging demographic makes any social security program for the elderly unsustainable with only two workers for every person drawing benefits.  The major impetus for escalating health care costs is directly attributable to the inescapable reality that we are living longer with more expensive health remedies available, and there are too few still working (and contributing) to pay for it all.  Another slow train coming is too few young fit people to staff a strong military and too few taxpayers to fund it.

The myth of overpopulation touted incessantly in the 70’s is long behind us.

If I … comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge…, but do not have love, I am nothing.   1 Cor 13:2

Last week in Washington, there were two demonstrations: one to express support for new gun control legislation was attended by three to four thousand people and received ubiquitous coverage by every major network and print news media.  The second was to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973 that overturned every state law in the country that limited abortion for any reason at any stage of pregnancy.  Attended by somewhere between 500,000 and 650,000 people, the March for Life got little if any mention on most news outlets (except for Fox News and EWTN) with every effort made to obfuscate the size of the crowd.

The most eye-catching aspect of the turnout was the average age of the participants.  Hundreds of thousands of young people from high school to post graduates braved the bitter cold, carried signs and chanted, “We are the pro life generation.”  They are the survivors of the last forty years in which between 25 and 33% of those conceived in the womb were killed – fifty five million of them.  Earnest, healthy, full of life, intelligence and humor, the young people came.  The progeny of a generation of materialists, hedonist pleasure seekers, narcissists and those committed to self fulfillment, not self sacrifice, they came.  To make extraordinarily clear that the torch has been passed to those even better suited for the fight, they came.  And given the sparse numbers born to those committed to a pro-choice agenda, these born to be pro life will eventually triumph – even if just by an inexorable demographic.

These are the children cutting the firebreak, and they will persist.  They will not go gently into the night.  They will “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.  Deuteronomy 30:19 (NIV)

One more article captured my attention this week.  In it pro choice (or formerly pro choice) reporters described what they observed in abortion clinics.  For the sake of brevity and limiting the brutality, I will cite only one out of seven.  Pro choice author, Magda Denes, in her book, “Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death Inside an Abortion Hospital”, wrote this about coming into an operating room following the abortion of a second trimester baby:

I remove with one hand the lid of a bucket … I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person there floating in a bloody liquid- plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But then perhaps this was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises and the face has the agonized tautness of one forced to die too soon. Death overtakes me in a rush of madness … I have seen this before. The face of a Russian soldier, lying on a frozen snow covered hill, stiff with death and cold. … A death factory is the same anywhere, and the agony of early death is the same anywhere.

We have made technological advances undreamt of by our parents and grandparents.  Among these is the scientific and medical ability to control pregnancies in a way not possible just forty years ago.  We can take a pill to end a pregnancy and flush a new life away.  We bicker about whether taxpayers who find the practice morally repugnant and in violation of their religious freedom should have to pay for it.  We seem to have lost the thread on the larger question.  The issue is not “how” or even “why”, the issue is “ought”.

These are some of the gripping questions it will take at least another generation to determine, and they will look into themselves, not into the media, to resolve them.  And this generation is hopeful and ready.

So to my pro life and pro choice friends, I pose these queries.  Have we come so far?  We differentiate ourselves from all other known species not just with rationality and imagination, but with accrued knowledge, wisdom, a search for love, truth and beauty, with spirit and soul, and with consciences formed by all of these facets.  Do we endure in dragging along with our hoodies up, our ear buds in and our eyes cast down a yard or so ahead of our sad shuffling?  Is this really the best we can make of it?  Is this really the best we can do?

The world arrays a twofold battle line. It offers temptation to lead us astray; it strikes terror into us to break our spirit.  Hence if our personal pleasures do not hold us captive, and if we are not frightened by brutality, then the world is overcome.  St. Augustine

St. Patrick’s Christmas

Friday night, we brought our granddaughter, Gianna (pronounced “Jahna”) to the St. Patrick’s Parish Nativity play.  Gianna remained rapt for the entire performance, needing an occasional gentle restraint from wandering too far up the aisle.  A teen choir accompanied the players; there were twirling, dancing, singing angels, a trek around the church with a donkey for Mary and Joseph only to be turned away at several inns, sheep singing with shepherds, a tall, lanky, twelve year old yellow star leading three Magi to the cradle and the tiny Holy Family in the stable.  All of the players were ardently earnest; everyone sang.  We stood to cheer for them at the end. Gianna didn’t want to leave.

“Are we like sheep?”

St. Patrick is a small, inner city bilingual parish.  The parishioners span a wide cross section of Providence life from all ages, colors and abilities, almost none of them affluent.  Prison tattoos can be seen on some of the men, who are attending with their families. These men hug their wives and kids frequently; some have packs of cigarettes in their shirt pockets.  St. Pat’s has a soup kitchen and help for the homeless at a food pantry called Mary House; there is a small Eucharistic adoration chapel in a converted office trailer with a year round 24/7 vigil.  Pretensions are rare. There is no cry room; children make children noises:  beautiful sounds.  We are reminded of our first parish as adults in Maine, St. Joseph’s, because of the community life, joyful music, love and peacefulness of the assembly.  We have come home again.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned..    W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Jesse Lewis

Grace Audrey McDonnell

Daniel Barden

Charlotte Bacon

Ana Marquez-Greene

The Children of Newtown

I have been to Newtown many times. My old company had a lumberyard there about three miles from the Sandy Hook School.  Much has been written about the perfect New England village with the friendly coffee shops and picturesque woods, fields and upscale homes of NYC professionals.  All of this is true, yet it is a town like any other.  Like yours and mine with the imperfections, well hidden family troubles, anxieties and small betrayals, as well as love, joyful sounds, Christmas lights and festivities.  And schools.

Evil visited Newtown a week ago.   Books will be written about the deterioration and lack of funding for mental health facilities and support; about semi automatic weapons such as the AR-15 with hundred shot clips (for which I can see no earthly rationale for circulation in the general population, just to be clear – they have only one function); about bullying and Asperger Syndrome and autism spectrum disorders;  about the sad necessity for fortress schools; about the crushing of some children who never recover from their parent’s divorce and withdraw into a killing isolation; about the failure to identify evil before it pounces full throated on the innocent; about a fascination with violence within our entertainment, within ourselves.  It seems to me a confluence of these things created Adam Lanza, a weak, cowardly and wounded boy/man; they afforded him the facilities to make a decision for evil. All of these aspects merit full analysis to uncover a passageway to enable us to perform our most basic human function – to protect our young.

I think also, we need to be thinking about Pope John Paul’s Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life), a 1995 encyclical in which he decried a “culture of death” which has inculcated itself into our attitudes and practices, almost without notice anymore.  This dark culture misconstrues freedom as license, leading to “this eclipse of the sense of God”, and devolving ever more into narcissism, materialism, hedonism and utilitarianism.  Adam Lanza was the product of his personal and familial pathology, but he also was the effluence of the milieu in which he swam.  A “culture of death” according to John Paul most specifically reveals its morbidity as a war of the strong against the weak, be they handicapped, old or unborn.  “The first to be harmed are women, children, the sick or suffering and the elderly.”  Adam Lanza was harmed.  From that he made increasingly easy decisions to inflict his rage and pain on others more vulnerable: one evil act cascading into the unspeakable – a definition of evil.

Perhaps Eugene Kennedy, cited in Peggy Noonan’s column, put best what should be our response to all of this (in addition to seeking preventative solutions).  What good can we take from this senseless act?   Newtown reminds us of “the mystery of being alone in the world as it is and as we are… with cracks running through it… from small disappointments to blows of the heart.” But it “revealed the goodness of normal people, which is seldom celebrated” when the teachers sacrificed their lives trying to shield the children.  Ms. Noonan says that we will attempt to respond politically to “take actions that will make our world safer, and this is understandable. But there is no security from existence itself.”  As Professor Kennedy put it, the answer is to “plunge into life  … we have to engage in life and take it on with all the risks it entails or we won’t be alive at all.”  “It is better to suffer pain than to live in a world in which you don’t allow yourself to be close enough to anybody to have the experience that’s bound to give us suffering.  Love guarantees suffering.”

Kennedy concludes, ”we’re all on a hero’s journey… the hero faces challenges along the way… entering the forest each day without a cut path, and finding our way through is what we are called to do.”  Here, says, Ms. Noonan, Mr. Kennedy suggests that faith offers not an explanation of tragedy, but the only reliable guide.  “Jesus said, ‘I am the Way.’ That is not a metaphor.”

“Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb?  Even should she forget, I will never forget you.”   Isaiah 49:15

The response at St. Patrick’s Church was not to be embittered or paralyzed with sadness over inexplicable tragedy, but to embrace the life given to us.  At the conclusion of the pageant, Rita asked our four year old Gianna if she wanted to be in the nativity play next year when she turned five.  I suggested that she could practice really hard and be the donkey.  Never lacking ambition, Gianna told us she wanted to be Mary.  Mary, the Christ bearer, who within her carried Love, is the call to all of us at this time of the year.  To hold within us Love, and to do what that Love calls us to.  For when it comes down to it, that is all we have.

NYC Nativity, Mary waits and welcomes

Heather was a nineteen year old freshman at Columbia University, one of the world’s most prestigious centers of learning.  Her frequent mood swings of deep depression and unpredictable crying led her to visit a psychiatrist at the school’s clinic, Dr. Miriam Grossman.  Dr. Grossman drew out Heather’s personal situation.  Her new boyfriend was delighting in the female gift of her young body, but was balking at going out to eat or to a movie because that might lead to a “relationship”, and he didn’t want a relationship: he just wanted to be friends…..with benefits. Heather was wondering why she was depressed because “friends with benefits” was a common arrangement after all, and she had not considered it as a possible source of her unhappiness.  From Dr. Grossmans’ book “Unprotected”: “Heather thinks women are like men, so she’s puzzled when her “friend with benefits” – a man with whom she has a physical relationship, no strings attached – is content, while she hates herself.  Is Zoloft the answer?”

In “Unprotected” she writes of other client-students she counseled: Stacey, who was cutting herself with scissors, had an HPV infection that would be with her the rest of her life; condoms are ineffective with HPV and 25% of teenage and above women are infected.  Some strains of HPV can cause cervical cancer.  The medical community’s and big Pharm’s solution de jour is inoculating all young girls with “Gardasil”, which a study now shows can trigger the premature death of ovaries and eggs causing permanent infertility.  Stacey had three “relationships” in the last year and was unaware whether her partners may have had previous relationships, creating multiples of exposure; her odds of HPV infection went up 300%.

Then there was Olivia, who was bulimic, vomiting frequently and depressed, the first big love of her young life having dumped her.  She told Dr. Grossman, “When it ended, it hurt so much,” she said, weeping.  “I think about him all the time and I haven’t been going to one of my classes, because he’ll be there, and I can’t handle seeing him.  I was unprepared for this. Why, doctor,” she asked, “why do they tell you how to protect your body – from herpes and pregnancy – but they don’t tell you what it does to your heart?”

Dr. Grossman eventually left Columbia when she became terminally discouraged with both the medical community’s acquiescence in a political and social agenda and Columbia’s advice to its students on the “Go Ask Alice” web site for students. “Go Ask Alice” suggests experimentation to help students “find their sexual identity” tacitly encouraging multiple “friends”, ménage à trois trysts and homosexual hook ups.  Sadly, Columbia is far from unique.

Dr. Grossman started her (wholly secular) crusade.  Here is a direct quote from her website mission statement:

I am here to tell you that radical politics pervades healthcare, and common sense has vanished. Who’s paying the highest price?  Girls and women.

Not long ago, we physicians could call casual sexual activity “mindless” and “empty”.  Before political correctness muzzled us in the 90’s, a therapist might advise her client that it is love and life-long fidelity that bring liberated sensuality and provide the best insurance against infectious diseases.  An unwanted pregnancy, an abortion – these were weighty issues.

We understood that men and women are profoundly different and weren’t afraid to say so….Self restraint built character, and character was something to strive for…

Things have changed.  Teens are encouraged to explore and experiment with their sexuality.  Self-discipline has been replaced with latex and Plan B.  There is tacit approval of promiscuity, and an STI is a rite of passage.  Abortion?  It’s likened to a tonsillectomy. 

The health care system has declared war on tobacco and alcohol, tanning salons and transfats, but is silent about the hazards of our hook-up culture….Devoted professionals, motivated by altruism are foisting these agendas on young people. I witness the ramifications daily.

The agenda is sunk deeply into the soil of some misguided feminism that confuses equal treatment and opportunities for women with men and women being the same in every aspect of their personalities.  Even well-meaning parents are not immune.  Many “put” their teenage daughters on birth control pills, some below the age of legal consent, falling into the trap that all of them will be sexually active anyway, and there is nothing to be done about it, so we may as well protect them as best we can.  Their girls remain unprotected, however, against emotional havoc and over 50 sexually transmitted diseases.  The implicit communication is that character development in all things sexual and self-control are not possible — and the girl is informed subtly that she is ready and available.

“Which of you fathers, if your (daughter) asks for a fish will give (her) a serpent instead? Or if (she) asks for an egg, will give (her) a scorpion?”  Luke 11: 11-12 with apologies to St. Luke for paraphrasing for a female child.

Further ripping away the mantle of protection are the possible side effects of the pill itself: increased risk of depression, mood swings, weight gain, suicide, breast cancer, infertility, stroke, blood clots, cervical cancer and, most ironically, loss of libido.  The World Health Organization lists the birth control pill as a Group 1 Carcinogen along with tobacco, asbestos, benzene, formaldehyde, plutonium and others.  In NYC schools, a pilot program with the catchy acronym CATCH (Connecting Adolescents To Comprehensive Healthcare) provides birth control pills, Plan B abortion pills, Depo-Provera long-lasting contraceptive shots as well as condoms to 22,000 students as young as 14 in 14 city high schools without parental consent or notification. They can’t get an aspirin from the school nurse without parental consent.  Political correctness run amok.

When the Catholic Church objects to Obamacare mandating inclusion of contraception and abortifacient drugs in their health care plans, the Health and Human Services department of the Obama administration refuses to allow an exemption (with the very narrow exception of churches themselves).  Catholic hospitals, schools, charitable organizations and universities are put in the impossible dilemma of providing what is morally repugnant to them or not providing a health plan at all to their employees.  Over 40 lawsuits are pending.  Political correctness runs rough shod over religious freedom, freedom of conscience and common sense.

“Unprotected”, indeed:  it seems we have lost our way.

While it is true, of course, that (technological progress) ha(s) given us tremendous power, it is absurd to suggest that we must use this power to destroy our most precious inheritance: liberty.  The Road to Serfdom – F. A. Hayek

She was naked, terrified, utterly alone, confused, sinking ever deeper into hypothermia.  Initial shivering and body movement slowly diminished.  She hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink all day; in point of fact she had never eaten since she was born – early that morning.  Her cries weakened; the slight rising and falling of her little chest was barely evident.  The baby lay on a ledge outcropping at the edge of the forest; her recently severed umbilical cord was clearly visible.  The cautious female hyena approached tentatively, her head in constant motion looking for the baby’s protector, but there was no one.  Creeping ever closer, the scent aroused the hyena’s hunger.  Jaws opened and snapped closed; the weak cries stopped altogether.  The hyena mother picked up the tiny body and knew what to do, what all mothers should do: back in the cave her babies had to eat.

In ancient Rome and Greece, infanticide was routinely practiced.  Often the murder was by neglect: exposure to the elements or putting babies outside by the doorstep in earthen jars.  Starvation, thirst, asphyxiation, cold, heat or predators would kill them, and the parents could absolve themselves from direct responsibility because a god or another person could have come along and saved them.  Some were more direct.  Burying alive, strangulation, bashing them against a rock or throwing infants into the Tiber, each method had its advocates.

We would prefer to suppose such barbaric practices were abandoned as more enlightened civilizations evolved.  Since the most recent past century was the bloodiest in human history, we should be disabused of our smug pretensions by now. Even a cursory examination will show that infanticide is still common, especially in China and India, but it is a curse in every nation, including our own.  The most frequent victims due to various sociological pathologies and selection have always been baby girls. Link to a brief history of infanticide.  

Outrage and violence, this is all I see,

all is contention, and discord flourishes.

And so the law loses its hold,

and justice never shows itself.

Yes, the wicked man gets the better of the upright,

and so justice is seen to be distorted.

Habakkuk 1: 4 -6

Dr. Peter Singer holds the Ira W. Decamp Chair of Bioethics at Princeton University and is considered by many as one of the premier bioethicists in America.  The guiding light of the animal rights movement, he decries “speciesism” as being as woeful a human failing as racism or sexism.  His premise is that a mature animal capable of suffering is more deserving of our protection than, say, a human pre born or neonate.

Prominent in his post modern ethic is euthanasia for the suffering or disabled, especially if they are infants.  His is a “quality of life” utilitarian ethic, not a “sanctity of life” natural law ethic.  Let him speak for himself.  “We may not want a child to start on life’s uncertain voyage if the prospects are clouded. When this can be known at a very early stage in the voyage, we may still have a chance to make a fresh start. This means detaching ourselves from the infant who has been born, cutting ourselves free before the ties that have already begun to bind us to our child have become irresistible. Instead of going forward and putting all our effort into making the best of the situation, we can still say no, and start again from the beginning.”

Nor is Dr. Singer alone in his cause.  Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist, Sir John Sulston, who also worked on the Human Genome project, implicitly advocated the extermination of the disabled when he said, “I don’t think one ought to bring a clearly disabled child into the world”.  Professor Robert Edwards, the IVF pioneer who helped bring to birth the world’s first test-tube baby, said, “Soon it will be a sin for parents to have a child which carries the heavy burden of genetic disease.”  Playing God is an adult game as old as humankind and is still in vogue.

Now, we cannot ascribe this position solely to the radical fuming of ivory towered academia; Dr. Singer was the bioethics advisor in the Clinton administration and remains one of the lights (such as it is) to that which informs much of the “progressive” agenda.  Here’s another of his pomposities, “Human babies are not born self-aware or capable of grasping their lives over time. They are not persons. Hence their lives would seem to be no more worthy of protection than the life of a fetus.”   Couldn’t be much more clear, and in this regard, I am in complete agreement with the last phrase.  There is no moral difference between abortion and early infanticide.  It is not the journey down the birth canal and into the light that makes a human being a person.

“After ruling our thoughts and our decisions about life and death for nearly two thousand years, the traditional Western ethic has collapsed.”  Dr. Peter Singer

More disturbing still is the mainstreaming of the utilitarian ethic concerning human life and the insistence of the progressive that irrespective of our profound moral objections, we all should pay for it.  Buried among the 5 gazillion platitudes, the 2012 platform of the Democratic Party Convention included this: The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. That’s “newspeak” for “we want complete access to abortion for any reason at any stage of the pregnancy paid for by the state.” The platform committee included in its members some of the most radical progressives like Barney Frank. **

As a State Senator, Barack Obama opposed a bill protecting infants born alive during a botched abortion.  Ramesh Ponnuro’s recent article in National Review Online wrote of it and quoted Obama, “Granting them protection by requiring that a second doctor be present to treat any born-alive infant would ‘burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.’ Legal protection for these infants, in addition to being wrong on principle, would inhibit abortion.”   (Emphasis mine.) Apparently, drowning them in a bucket like a kitten (as is common practice among abortionists when something goes wrong and the baby is born alive) was perfectly OK with the good senator.  He is the most radically pro abortion president in our history.

No clichés about the slippery slope.  We’re well past the crest and rushing down the icy hill.  The question is: what are we going to do to mitigate the crash at the bottom?

You’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

Gotta Serve Somebody (From the album “Slow Train Coming”)   Bob Dylan

** The DNC Platform Committee also caused public furor when, unprecedented, they removed any reference to “God”and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which after a political decision to limit the damage, treated us to the spectacle of God, Israel and Jerusalem being booed from the floor of the DNC.  The Mayor of Los Angeles,  Antonio Villaraigosa, was forced to gavel over the objections of many convention delegates to add those references back in on a voice vote that clearly fell short of the 2/3’s needed. Pretty entertaining though.  (Link to video).

 An early fall chill lends urgency to the just after sunrise start.  A five person house framing crew stretches and climbs out of the crew cab pickup truck, which tows the tools and nails trailer.  The first floor deck sheathing had been laid down the day before, and first walls would be nailed in place before day’s end – on track to frame the 2,300 square foot colonial in three weeks with garage and farmer’s porch.

First out of the trailer is the generator and compressor; no temp power is yet available at the jobsite.  Next out, the carpenters deploy cords for the saws and hoses for the nail guns.  The truck from the lumberyard pulls in.  The driver releases the Moffet forklift from the back and begins to unload pre cut studs, plate stock, OSB sheathing and a few 2 x 10’s for headers according to the estimator’s take off and framing foreman’s review with the lumber salesperson.   The practiced driver spreads the materials about the foundation to limit the amount of grunt work by the carpenters to get the right product to its designated place in the structure.

Carpenters jump on the lumber driver with good natured  repartee; profanity goes back and forth along with bawdy inquiries about girlfriends, wives and the attractive woman two doors down in the house they finished a couple of months ago.  Almost no sentence and few phrases avoid the habitual “F” bomb as a verb, noun, exclamation, adjective, adverb or occasionally an emphatic two syllables in the middle of a word.   “Where are my f’ing pencils and hoodies?”  As the driver pulls away, the lead carpenter or foreman is already snapping chalk lines on the deck.  After cutting them to the right length, he tacks together top and bottom plates to mark them out for studs as a start to assemble one of the twenty or thirty walls that make up the first floor.  Worn plans are rolled out on a makeshift plywood table.

The rest of the crew carries studs to nail between the plates and begins to cut headers, jacks, cripples, window frame sills and all the rest.  There isn’t a lot of talk by this time; everyone knows what to do.  By 8:30 or 9, they are standing up the first walls, bracing them plumb and level.  As the sun gets higher, shirts come off.  Arms, chests and backs are well developed, not with gym muscles, but resilient strength that will go all day.   Everyone is tanned dark with calloused hands.   At around 10 or so, the “roach coach” bounces in with horn blaring and the crew drifts over for coffee and snacks.  Some of the guys buy their lunch for later, usually a plastic wrapped day old sandwich or steamed hot dog.  The joking banter starts up anew.  By the end of the day, the first floor walls will be ready for the second floor joists tomorrow.

So the process goes.  The foundation form workers, concrete trucks, tree cutters and site work equipment have already come and gone – the dirt movers will return later to finish the final grading, driveway and landscaping.  After the roof is on and the windows are in, the other subs show up sequentially scheduled by the contractor:  roofer, siding and exterior trim crew,  MEPs – mechanicals (heating, ventilation, etc), electricians, plumbers, then masons, insulation installers, sheet rockers, plasterers, finish carpenters, painters, flooring installers, cabinetry and countertop makers.  Some MEPs come to rough in, and others come to install the finishing plumbing, lighting, fixtures and cover plates after all the other crews have finished their work.   Carefully planned throughout the progression are the various permits, inspections and checklists along the way to comply with thick code books and engineering requirements.  Sometimes in a small company, the builder and his wife finish up to final clean and take the manufacturer’s stickers off the windows.

Many of the subs know each other from other jobs.  Most get along; some don’t, especially if their work is increased or complicated by other subs.  If the plumber gets out a Sawzall and attacks floor joists to put in their drains or the sheet rocker buries the electrical boxes, sometimes sparks fly literally or figuratively.  The contractor frequently plays the role of arbitrator in these disputes.

Dependent upon these job site jobs are thousands of hardworking lumberyard, window, door and appliance manufacturers, pipe makers, wire makers, cabinet makers, log sawyers, timber cutters, gypsum and copper miners, cabinet makers, lighting assemblers, supply houses, realtors and myriad others who benefit from this bedrock industry.  Without them, our economy will and has suffered grievous harm.

An efficient builder will turn over a typical new house of this size in 90 days from digging the foundation to bikes in the driveway.  Some of the big national builders can get occupancy permits in 70 days.  When a company puts up 30,000 houses a year, efficiency is at a premium.  A large, fully custom home can take a year or more.  Approvals for lots and subdivisions usually take several years with frequently contentious planning board and zoning variance hearings.  Deals are cut for “contributions” to the town such as sewage pumping stations or Little League fields.  Relationships for good or ill are forged with building inspectors.  Bonds are filed; roads are cut; land is donated to the towns for public use.  Acquisition, development and construction loans are a never ending ongoing struggle.  Creativity abounds.

As large as the big builders are like Pulte, Lennar and D.R. Horton, most new homes are still built by small entrepreneurial builders, who by their risk taking, will, intelligence, experience, persistence and courage turn raw land into someone’s dream and shelter from the storm.

On this Labor Day weekend, I salute the thousands of entrepreneurs, who work as architects, engineers, contractors and subcontractors; almost all are small businesses.  They claw a living out of the earth, providing jobs for many others and homes for families all across this country in every state and county. I have been in and around this business for almost forty years, and my admiration for these independent, skilled businessmen is undiminished.  I am proud to play a small role in this demanding enterprise.

The fruit of their work is a fundamental of human survival – shelter. An honorable, necessary and admirable group of skilled builders, artisans and sub contractors get up each workday morning in wind, numbing cold, snow or parching heat or steady drizzle to provide with great difficulty what is critical to our way of life.

And, yes, Mr. President, they did build it.

Oh, a storm is threat’ning
My very life today
If I don’t get some shelter

Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away  

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

My colleague from three companies ago, Anthony, lives near Atlanta making his living as a “storyteller, speaker, humorist and writer.”  When I first encountered him as a professional trainer, he was (and presumably still is) engaging, funny, warm, articulate and full of insights he was most eager to pass along to us; he was good at what he did.  We engaged in a brief exchange of ideas as comments in last week’s blog, in which we went back and forth with a fundamental divergence of opinion – would that all opposing views could be discussed so genially.  Later in the week Anthony published the current edition of his “Waypoints – Guideposts for Fellow Travelers” entitled “The Truth Fairy.” It is herein attached; please give it a read.  Link to Waypoints.  Back arrow to return to this post.  Sign up, and he will add you to his email distribution list.

His ideas, so amicably held and voiced, when juxtaposed to mine, lead us to what I believe is the crucial divide of our times – a rift that cannot be reconciled, but can have mutual understanding and respect among people of good will.  Religious and agnostic; progressive and conservative all distill down to this:  utilitarian positivism and moral relativism in stark contrast to the concepts of revelation and natural law.

Postmodern ideals and ethics evolved through the Enlightenment and later the Nihilism and “God is Dead” philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the Existential writings of Jean Paul Sartre and many others.  Perhaps the positivist roots go even deeper into thirteenth and fourteenth century scholastic writings and Father Wilhelm of Ockham of “Ockham’s Razor” renown.  These seminal ideas developed parallel with the ascendency of the scientific method as the sole arbiter of truth like a robotic meshworm boring through the ear and into the brain of Western Civilization until it insinuated itself into the synapses and impulses, unhinging us utterly from any absolutes, and as Waypoints would have us say, “Are there any truths or are there merely facts?  To say that a thing is true is to definitively and confidently declare it both undeniable and incontrovertible.”   Just so.

The argument of the positivist is that without empirical evidence nothing can be known as true.  In the beginning, those like Father Wilhelm would exempt the unknowable complexities of God and miracles from the strictures of positivist dogma because revelation and faith are by definition of a different nature of truth.  As all ideas have consequences, fledgling positivist thought eventually overran all that Creator folderol and pontificated loudly “Gott ist tot! – if indeed He ever existed – and He is therefore irrelevant to the discussion.”

“Ultimately, the problem with militant neo-atheism is that it represents a profound category error.  Explaining religion – or indeed the human experience – in scientific terms is futile.  It would be as bizarre to launch a scientific investigation into the truth of Anna Karenina or love.”  Bryan Appleyard writing in the New Statesman

My contention is not that Waypoints expresses the thoughts of a dyed in the wool positivist, clearly Anthony chooses an alternative faith, that of Emerson and Thoreau and “The Little Prince”, but only that positivist thought inculcates our culture and fashions our perspectives.  If we wandered through most of what passes for education since the mid twentieth century, it is the sea in which we swim and the lens through which we see.

My objection lies in the dismissal of those who are of a different faith as “blindly giving all that I have to you” and foolishly relying on “an anthology of ancient stories, screeds and scriptures, all of which are subject to great debate and drastically differing translations,” and thus to Anthony ”both silly and pointless.”  This seems to me superficial and smug, unworthy of such an intelligent mind.

“Don’t lay no boogie woogie on the King of Rock and Roll!”   Long John Baldry

As an aside, the utopian visions of Emerson, which have their foundation in transcendental principles not provable or disprovable in physical experience, were tried and found wanting in the communes of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the gulags of the Soviet Union.  Emerson and Thoreau were among the guiding lights of Brook Farm, but only visited; they didn’t live there, being far too bright for that.  No utopian society existed that did not deconstruct into discord, chaos, tyranny or dystopia.  As for the “Little Prince”, unless one reads Antoine Saint-Exupery in the original French, we are relying on one of dozens of translations.

The library we call the Bible, the meticulous translations from the original languages and the tens of thousands of books written about it and the faith it represents are among the most comprehensively analyzed, discussed and thought about subjects in human history.  Thomas Huxley, the famed agnostic biologist of Victorian times, put it this way, “Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings…, and there still remains in the old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur.”

Is truth exclusive?  In other words, if two things are posited and are exactly opposite, is it only my truth and your truth with no objective judgment possible wherein one position is right and the other wrong?  Or is objective truth itself a self evident impossibility outside the laboratory?

For the ancients of Western Civilization, the existence of a Natural Law of incontrovertible truths set deep in the DNA of human kind by its Creator was a given, far before the amazing body of Christian literature on the concepts by the likes of the brilliant Aquinas and Augustine.   No lesser light than Aristotle put it this way, “There is in nature a common principle of the just and unjust that all people in some way divine, even if they have no association or commerce with each other.”  As C.S. Lewis wrote, there are sometimes differing interpretations of what “fairness” means across cultures and times, but there is universal agreement that the concept of “fairness” is of high value to a healthy society.  No one contends that a culture rooted in injustice or unfairness would be a good one.  Or for that matter one rooted in cowardice, lies and the murder of the innocent.

So, dear friend, we can disagree about the mores and morals of our current culture, but please don’t admonish us to “think about it”.    We do.

Law is “the highest reason, implanted in Nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite.”  “Right is based, not upon men’s opinions, but upon Nature.”  Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)

A series of papers on “HIV in Men Who Have Sex with Men” from the prestigious British medical journal, Lancet, were presented as a symposium at the recent international AIDS 2012 conference in Washington, DC.  Not necessarily surprisingly, given current scientific dogma, one of the major causes of the continuing epidemic among active homosexual men was cited as homophobia and discrimination against gay men.

Oh yes, there are some behavioral risk factors, of course, but if only gay men felt secure enough to take advantage of best medical practices, HIV incidence would plummet.  Toxic intolerance, especially religious bigotry, compels homosexual men, particularly black homosexual men, to forgo proper care and increases risk. Huh?

One might reasonably ask what behavioral risks?   Within the papers, we find that active homosexual men are eighteen times more likely to contract the HIV virus and AIDS than the general population.  A single homosexual act with a new partner puts the impassioned at a 1.4% risk of HIV infection.  Why is that?

Several factors are named.  In the interest of keeping this a family friendly, PG rated blog, some discretion will be necessary.  Anal sex is more risky (if not more frisky) since HIV is a gut-tropic virus.  (i.e. the little guys tend to prosper in the alimentary canal.)   Secondly, since the male can be (not to put too fine a point on it) either the inserter or recipient in the transaction, the odds of something going awry increase and things can get dicey.  An additional risk factor, despite protestations of forever love and marriage, irrefutable statistics show the gay lifestyle to be predominantly promiscuous.  Multiple partners mean multiplication, if not exponential risk; it’s just math.  As a further result of these behaviors, gay men also have far higher rates of infection by other STDs, depression and substance abuse.   But, it’s homophobia that’s really at the root of the problem.

Whether the discussion is global warming/climate change, the creation of our universe, embryonic stem cell research (now largely moot due to scientific advancements using adult stem cells) and even “definitive” studies “proving” conservatives suffer from a kind of mental illness,   increasing impenetrability is encountered when trying to ascertain the real facts.  It seems almost impossible to determine what’s really behind the conclusions.  Larry Summers, former head of the Economic Council for President Obama and Treasury Secretary for President Clinton, lost his job as President of Harvard University when he said women were underrepresented at the highest levels of science, and that may be caused because women, while possessing higher average intelligence than men, are underrepresented at the periphery of the intelligence bell curve – both ends:  more male geniuses and more males with below normal IQs.  Just citing a scientific study sealed his fate among the faculty, which condemned him with a vote of no confidence.

 If someone presumes to question the causes or the proposed solutions for global warming, they are relegated to the ranks of anti science Neanderthals, but the scandalous emails exposing the ideological agenda of the purveyors of global warming are passed off as an anomaly.  If a layperson suggests that cloning human beings to kill them and harvest their stem cells may pose moral difficulty, well that reactionary is clearly a desperately ignorant, knuckle dragging dupe.  Physics by definition has no idea what occurred before the Big Bang, when time and space and light and matter came into being, yet if someone suggests that there may be a theological explanation, the derision dripping from some scientists is transcendent.

Dogma of any kind is similarly derided by the ideology of the left.  Yet someone’s dogma prevails always; whether the dogma of science or ideology or religion, there is a body of thought and belief that forms conclusions and solutions.  To believe that there is no dogma promulgated by worship at the altar of the god of “purely objective” science, is naïve and dangerous.

“Science is silent on what should be done with the fruits of science.  Science can cure illnesses and cause them, destroy cities and build them, save lives and take them.  It is the realm outside of science, the realm of morality and religion.  i.e., the realm of dogma that tells us what is permissible and what is taboo.  The scientist free of moral dogma is a cartoon villain who creates death rays for sport or ransom. 

Dogma constrains how science should be done.  The Hippocratic Oath… represents not a triumph of science but a triumph of moral absolutism.” 

“The Tyranny of Clichés”, Jonah Goldberg.

                      Leon Black was revealed this week as the buyer in May of “The Scream”, the Edvard Munch masterpiece of terror and despair, for nearly $120 million, the largest amount ever paid for a work of art.  After leaving as head of Mergers and Acquisitions for Drexel, Burnham, Lambert, Mr. Black founded Apollo Global Management, a private equity, alternative investment firm specializing in leveraged buyouts and restructuring of distressed corporations.  He is widely respected as a knowledgeable collector of art, sitting on the board of both New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, setting up a potential rivalry for display of the pastel on board version of the image.