Category Archives: Culture views

A trademark of the National Socialist German Workers Party was meticulous central planning.  Adolph Hitler had a plan for everything.  And everyone.  Hitler remembered well Napoleon’s admonition that an army marches on its stomach and was determined that this time around Germany would not lose the food war.  Both supply and demand had to be addressed.

To secure a steady food source for the German people, Hitler’s design for his Lebensraum (‘living space’) was a fertile land of about 20 million acres east of Germany. That this acreage was then occupied and governed by Slavs, Poles and Russians was an inconvenient speed bump. In his “Hunger Plan”, his preparation for the demand side was just as direct: to cut down the “useless eaters” by cutting off their food or killing them more expeditiously.  Chief among the eaters were Jews, Slavs, Poles, Russians, the disabled, the mentally challenged and the “degenerates” such as homosexuals. His implementation was carried out efficiently with accurate records kept along the way.  Many were murdered outright; many more died of deprivation and starvation.

Before we indulge in self congratulatory smugness about our moral superiority to the Nazi monsters, examine a few instances where this type of utilitarian ethic presents itself in our own time and culture.  In the most recent edition of the Journal for Medical Ethics there was an article entitled, “After Birth Abortion:  Why should the baby live?” by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.   The authors contend that all the reasons for abortion should be equally valid for new born infants.  If the infant is disabled or imperfect in any way, it is a given that they can be eliminated since newborns are just another species of “potential” human being.  They blandly state that other justifications would include health and inconvenience for the mother, such as a new job offer, financial stress or they just don’t like the kid, so it would be difficult for the family. Up until some time line in the sand to be determined, the contention is that a “potential” human being (or “useless eater”) can be put down like an old blind dog.  We already have a euphemism, not infanticide, but “after birth abortion”.

This is not a new argument.  Peter Singer, President Clinton’s bioethics advisor, was the founder of the animal rights movement.  Within that PETA group, it is dogma that an animal’s life is morally equivalent to a human life.  Dr. Singer, still a bioethics professor at Princeton, published an article forty years ago entitled, “Killing Babies Isn’t Always Wrong”.  The bizarre twist to this is that with the current interpretation of the law, killing a baby (read ‘aborting a fetus’) is permissible up until the moment of birth.  Why is Dr. Singer’s, Dr. Giubilini’s and Dr. Minerva’s position any different ethically than current law?  The answer, of course, is that it isn’t, but merely a natural extension of accepted principle.

A subtle, but nonetheless troubling, example of a utilitarian perspective occurred just a few weeks ago from the Obama administration.  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius deliberately ran rough shod over first amendment religious freedom with the administration’s edict to force private Catholic institutions to contract with health insurance companies to provide abortifacient drugs and contraceptive drugs, clearly violating the Church’s moral law.  President Obama offered a transparent and cynical “compromise”, when they protested.  Don’t worry, he patronized, we’ll just make the insurance companies pay for it.  The American bishops responded with the obvious – that insurance companies won’t put these drugs on their bill, but would certainly build the costs into their rates.

Here’s the rub. The president’s rejoinder to the bishops? The insurance companies wouldn’t have to charge because dispensing contraceptives and abortifacient drugs saved them money; it’s cheaper than having babies.  Chemical contraceptives act as abortifacients on occasion and for some like the “morning after” pill, it is their intention.   Think about the ethic that undergirds the president’s rationale for a moment.  What should make this morally acceptable to the bishops and people of faith, according to the president, is that the insurance companies can afford to give these drugs away because it saves them money.  As long as it costs less to abort a baby than to carry her to term, the moral calculus works for the insurance company, so it should be acceptable to the Church.

Utilitarian ethical theory, developed over two hundred years ago by John Stuart Mill and others, differs profoundly from deontological (or rule based) ethics.  Traditional Socratic ethics teaches that true happiness comes from doing what is right; for the utilitarian, happiness is the first goal, and the “right” is fungible.  The utilitarian holds that the overriding standard is the greatest good for the greatest number. What works, not what is right.   Killing, stealing, lying, cheating, breaking promises and manipulation are not intrinsically evil.  Nothing is intrinsically evil; what is good is what serves the greater good and happiness of the many. Understood, but unspoken is the axiom that the intellectual and power elite get to determine who is to be made happy.  And who is to be made dead.

from Psalm 31

Affliction has broken down my strength

and my bones waste away.

I am like a dead man, forgotten,

like a thing thrown away.

My life is in your hands, deliver me

from the hands of those who hate me.

The ancient Greek legends surrounding Prince Theseus have lessons for today.  Periodically, the king of Athens had agreed to send seven boys and seven girls to Crete to be fed to the Minotaur to appease King Minos.  The Athenian king’s son Theseus volunteered to be one of them, but said he would slay the creature to end the sacrifices.  The Princess Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete, fell in love with Theseus and betrayed to him the secret of killing the Minotaur, a fearsome monster, which was half man with the head of a bull.  She smuggled Theseus a sword and a ball of twisted threads.  The Minotaur lived deep in an impossible labyrinth; the challenge for Theseus was to find his way out should he prevail over the monster.  He needed both a sword and then the twine to leave a trail back.

We have labyrinths today and seem to be losing the thread to find our way back.  A few anecdotes portray some of the twists in the maze.  Some of these seem trivial, but illustrate that we are becoming lost in some fundamental way and are confused about our priorities.    These are mostly unrelated, but seem somehow of a piece.

•  In Belmont, Massachusetts recently, the animal control officer found a badly injured coyote.  Coyotes have become increasing vexing to suburban Boston communities, and Belmont is among the most affluent.  Twice in the last year, they have attacked children in Massachusetts, and routinely pet cats and small dogs disappear to coyote packs.  The town official didn’t dispatch the coyote to end its suffering.  No, she brought it to an animal rescue hospital in Grafton, MA, which at a cost to the taxpayers in excess of $2,000 nursed it back to health over three months.  The coyote was a fertile, young female, which they did not spay.  Then, of course, they brought it out to release in a remote part of Western Massachusetts, right?  No, it was released with great celebration to the “wilds” of Belmont to reunite with its pack mates.  Does this seem misguided to anyone else?
• The Federal government has initiated a suit to set prices on e books because they are too high.  The Federal government apparently has solved all the problems of deficit spending, foreign wars, health care, poverty, education, religious freedom, Social Security and contraception, and has the time to turn their eye and insinuate their considerable power into the market place to “correct” the alleged malfeasance of publishers and book sellers.  What happened to a consumer shopping for a book, whether print or electronic, and if they could afford the price, buying it?
• The Federal government subsidizes with tax credits the manufacture, construction and operating costs of windmill power.  Recently, the Bonneville Power Authority in the Pacific Northwest, another Federal agency, asked the local wind power producers to shut down their windmills seasonally.  Since the existing hydroelectric plants on the rivers produce all the power needed when the rivers are flowing strongly, the windmills were redundant, and their power had no place to flow.  The rivers flowing and the wind blowing tend to peak at the same time of the year. The dams, which are far less expensive per kilowatt hour to run, don’t kill birds and are equally renewable.  Dam generators need to run when the rivers are high because, if they don’t, the salmon run to spawn will be endangered.  The windmills have to stop and lie fallow, not unlike farm subsidies.  The BPA will pay the windmill owners up to $50 million per year to do nothing, and the wind will only howl.
• The Justice Department has embarked on yet another crusade, most recently in Texas and South Carolina, to stop states from requiring identification of voters.  According to the department filing, voter photo IDs, even if provided free by the state to all who don’t have driver’s licenses, will have a disparate impact on the poor and minorities.  Voter fraud is a problem in many of the large cities where the dead cast their ballots early and often.  Since inner city votes favor almost entirely Democrat candidates, one might suspect an ulterior motive from Eric Holder, the current Attorney General.  Not so, says he.  His enthusiasm even with Fast and Furious, Supreme Court challenges to the health care mandate and myriad other pressing issues extends well above and beyond duty.  He has the time to decide how each state should determine who votes and how voter’s citizenship, right to vote and even their existence above the ground are verified.  Such dedication should not go unrecognized.
• Finally, we drop all the way through the looking glass into Wonderland.  And the looking glass is a wavy fun mirror that distorts all reality.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) petitioned the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva to stop the same voter photo ID laws in the U.S., even though Indiana’s ID laws were upheld by our Supreme Court in 2008.  It seems that the U.N. should have more authority over U.S. laws than our courts.  Among the member nations on the U.N. Human Rights Council are such human rights luminaries as Cuba, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, where women can’t vote at all.

We wander through the labyrinth running the thread through sweaty palms, just hoping to find our way back to the light.  Just a few of these cited twists and turns expose how tricky the journey is.

Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen.  Homer Simpson

Meg and her fiance Marty Gilbert

Mayor Bloomberg, complying with a court order under a Freedom of Information suit, recently released the test scores and rankings of 18,000 New York City teachers, publicly listing their names.  Rankings were based on their students’ performances in the standardized tests under the No Child Left Behind program begun during the Bush administration and continuing today.  The list purports to identify effective and ineffective teachers.  My daughter, Meg, now in her fourth year teaching in Harlem, posted a note on her Facebook page regarding this.  She was not damaged in this listing, but fine, dedicated colleagues she well knows to be hard working teachers were.   Here is an excerpt from her note addressed to Mayor Bloomberg:

“You do not consider the fact that many of these ‘ineffective’ teachers are attempting to teach children who enter their class severely deficient, are emotionally unstable, are living in shelters, are victims of domestic violence, have drug or alcohol addicted parents, are in the middle of child services cases or are even learning disabled, but are not yet labeled as such since the process to do so can take up to two years.

There are so many aspects that we, as teachers, deal with on a day to day basis.  I’d like to see you come into some of the underperforming neighborhoods of Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx and teach for one day.  You wouldn’t last an hour.

Why don’t you find out which children are failing these ridiculous tests that measures so little of their actual intelligence and ask their PARENTS why they continue to fail?  Every teacher knows that in order for a child to succeed, there needs to be a pyramid of effort.  The pyramid consists of the student, the teacher AND the parent.”

Since she took her job in NYC, Meg has related the horror stories to us of what her students face at home, if indeed, their domestic arrangements can be called a home.  And what she deals with daily with classroom disruptions, appalling student behavior and bureaucratic foolishness.  In her elementary school, NYPD police sit full time in the hallways – not security guards, but fully trained professional NYC cops.  Three major studies looked at why students fail or succeed in the United States and illuminate these issues.  These were cited in Dr. Charles Murray’s noteworthy book, “Real Education”.

The Coleman Report, resulting from a mandate of the 1964 Civil Right Act, was commissioned to determine the effects of inequality of educational opportunity.  Dr. James Coleman led the most exhaustive study before or since, involving 645,000 students nationwide.  Data were compiled about school history, parents’ socioeconomic statuses, neighborhoods, curricula, school facilities and teacher qualifications.  He fully expected the study to document that the quality of the schools would correlate strongly with the academic performance of the students.  What he found to his surprise was that teacher credentials, the newness and facilities of the schools, public money spent per student and the curricula were not critical to improving the learning of the students.  What consistently correlated with student performance was family background.  Not to say that great teachers and schools don’t make a profound difference in the lives of some individual children, because they do, but across wide populations, these do not consistently correlate with over all academic achievement.  Innate academic ability, family situations and family support do.

The Title 1 program of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 spent and continues to spend billions of dollars each year to upgrade schools attended by children of low income families.  Numerous studies were done to track Title 1 results.  Irrespective of the fond expectations of those gathering these data, no significant effect in any analysis from the 1970s forward has demonstrated improvement in the academic achievement of students in the schools aided by this program.  The most recent comprehensive study in 2001 by the Department of Education  (Dr. Murray’s book was published in 2008) showed that from 1986 to 1999 (the period of the study), the gap between high poverty and low poverty schools actually widened.

Finally, there is the No Child Left Behind programs, passed with strong bipartisan support in January of 2002 and championed by strange bedfellows George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy.  Everyone involved had the best of intentions.  Despite deep changes in the country’s NCLB educational system and a firestorm around “teaching to the test”, the results have been inconclusive at best.  After nearly ten years of effort, math scores for fourth graders at the 25^th percentile (lowest 25% of tested academic ability) have risen three points; eight graders fell two points and seniors fell one point. The effective change in reading scores at all levels for the 25^th, 10^th, 50^th and even the 75^th percentile was zero.

There is far, far too much to cover in a blog.  I strongly recommend reading Dr. Murray’s book. I can’t even begin to discuss the deleterious effects of teachers unions and bloated school department administrations. Dr. Murray’s book emphasizes four main positions:

• Abilities vary.
• Half of the children are below average.
• Too many people are going to college (especially four year liberal arts colleges).
• America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.

Educational romanticism, which is sacrosanct today, keeps as dogma that all but intellectually disabled children are capable of greatly improving academic performance, if held to high standards by good schools and tough tests.  While this view is lovely to contemplate, common sense and almost all developed data show it to be untrue.   A false premise condemns good teachers fighting the battle every day and cruelly sets unattainable expectations for many, while neglecting in some cases those who would most benefit.  Job specific technical training beyond high school needs to be strengthened and encouraged.  The exceptional teachers persevering in their frustrating jobs should be recognized for the heroes and heroines they are.

“It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after twenty years of being educated, how I’m supposed to think.”  Clarence Thomas

Alone in the crowd

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal featured Alain de Botton’s new book “Religion for Atheists: A Non Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion”, which is to be published in March.  His writing is crisp; his observations about the alienation in our culture are astute.  Unfortunately, he attributes the missing sense of community, still found in religious groups, to the lack of the familiarity of rites and formulae, and, of course, utterly misses the point.

“Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centered on the worship of professional success.  We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is, ‘What do you do?’, our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned.

Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness.  Even if we believe very little about what they tell us… we can nonetheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers… and prevent(s) us from building connections with others.”

Botton especially values the “genius” of the Catholic Mass.  The congregation, according to him, draws together dissimilar people from all layers of society.  Within the rituals, music and rote of the Mass, they are comfortable with one another; they know when to sit and when to stand and when to kneel.  The words of the prayers are known to all.  In fact even if one finds oneself among complete strangers speaking a foreign tongue, a Catholic can still participate in the Mass with ease – can still easily fit in and feel at home. The setting of the church, the composition of the attendees, who are not usually of the same race, profession, educational or income levels, yet share a “commitment to certain values”, all contribute to the connections of community.  These “values” include acceptance irrespective of class or success.

“As a result, we may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community that imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome.”

How the Church succeeds in his purview presents a formulaic means of implementing “community” among the lonely, disaffected individuals that everywhere inhabit our population. He does regret the loss of the Agape Meal (Love Feast) of early Christian communities that transformed into the Eucharist of current practice, but still holds that there is some value in what remains.  It is good to know that an atheist has some better ideas to improve the liturgy.

He suggests a secular alternative to worship could be concocted and offered to all.  A “Temple to Perspective” would set the stage, complete with a “to scale” timeline monument to lift our eyes to the stars and put into perspective our tiny presence in geological and astronomical terms.

Temple to Relationships

His solution would include meals in an uplifting set-aside space, but meals with rules and rituals, such that the participants feel welcome, get to know each other in non judgmental ways and follow set patterns of conversation that do not judge others – sort of speed dating with memorized lines and without sex or wine.  Sterile, bleak and contrived come to mind.  From G.K. Chesterton: “When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

Personally, I’d prefer the bustling atmosphere of sidewalk tables outside a Federal Hill restaurant (Mediterraneo?) on a summer evening, perhaps bumping into Buddy Cianci, our personable and felonious ex-Mayor making his rounds.

St. Augustine wrote, “Therefore do not understand in order to believe, but believe in order to understand.”  Mr. Botton’s perceptions about the existential loneliness, not just of modern man, but of man without God are entirely accurate.  The point that he misses is the whole one.  Such presumably willful and obstinate spiritual blindness in such an intelligent brain is a great sadness.  He wants the faith but resists with impressive agility the Author of it.  What faith filled Catholics and others hold in common are not merely “shared values” or acceptance of others, although those attributes are valuable, but a deep, personal faith and relationship with their God.  Not superstitious whistling past the graveyard dreams as assumed by those who do not believe, but the intimate relationship of creature and Creator that cannot be imagined or understood by those who have not experienced it and are close minded even to the search.

From St. Augustine’s Confessions

Fecisti nos 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.

Our American culture is replete with rifts both significant and trivial: rich vs. poor; equal opportunity vs. equal results; liberal vs. conservative; government as a solution vs. government as an obstacle; Patriots vs. Giants; pro life vs. pro abortion or pro assisted suicide; traditional one man one woman marriage vs. all manner of gay and sad alternates; Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street; Red Sox vs. Yankees; Bud Light vs. microbreweries.

Charles Murray, the libertarian political scientist and author, recently published his new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010”.  He limited his research to the white population and his employment statistics to pre 2008 to mitigate the variances due to race and recession.  The results are striking.  He proposes that the political divide (Tea Party) and economic split (OWS), while divisive, are far from the worst of our deepening separations.  His conclusion is that the accelerating values gap between the upper middle class and the working class is debilitating and threatens to end American culture as we have defined it for 250 years.  Some of it is economic, but most damaging are the cultural differences.

Some definitions will clarify the argument.  Dr. Murray studied in depth Belmont, a white affluent suburb of Boston, and Fishtown, a white working class neighborhood in Philadelphia.  His classifications are calibrated by education and employment.  Most of the people in the Belmont group had at least bachelor’s degrees and worked as doctors, lawyers, business owners, managers and academics.  In the Fishtown group, most had high school educations or less and worked in clerical, retail or blue collar jobs requiring little training.

While taking into account the admonition about “lies, damn lies and statistics”, some must be included in this discussion for it to make sense.  Dr. Murray’s evidence is convincing.  Both upper and lower classes have been affected by the cultural tsunami of the last fifty years, but the mores and habits of the working class have been even more drastically altered, thus increasing the gap.  In 1960, the average annual family income in inflation adjusted current dollars for the elite ‘zip codes’ was $84,000; today in relative terms it is $163,000.  During the same time period, married families in the elite group dropped from 94% to 83%; among our working class married households has fallen from 84% to 48%.   Children raised by single parents have risen from 1% to 6% among the Belmont families, and from 6% to 65% among those with a high school education or less.  Regular practice of religion went from 71% to 60% in the upper middle class, and from 62% to 41% in the working class.  Controlling for the recession, the gap between upper and working class industriousness (dropping out of the jobs market and working less than 40 hours) has also grown demonstrably.

The distressing reality is that the cultural commonality among the elites and the workers has fallen apart.  “The centre cannot hold.”  Elites live in enclaves increasingly isolated from the common folk.  They eat different food, take care of their bodies differently, watch different entertainment, go to different schools, take different vacations and share less and less with fellow citizens of lesser means.  While there has always been a gap, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted about American culture in the 1830’s, “The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people.  On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.”  For most that is no longer the reality of our daily lives.

Forty years ago or less, the population of America understood each other better, embracing a common civic culture and “shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about (core) American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religion.”  As we grow farther apart, communicating on a meaningful level becomes ever more problematic.  We talk at and around each other, not with each other.

The good news for Dr. Murray is that there is a burgeoning recognition  of the new American Great Divide as a grievous problem.   He suggests that the remedy is not amenable to government mandates or educational curricula; the cure is one family at a time, one person at a time and is the responsibility of each of us and all of us: to simply, make the effort to know one another better across the cultural divide.

One of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books was “The Long Winter”.  The life threatening challenges to Charles Wilder’s family were terrifying.  Our family sometimes wrapped in blankets just reading aloud about the cold and weeklong prairie blizzards.  Charles tied a rope from the door of their cabin to the barn. Each day he fed and milked their cow.  During the seemingly endless, howling storms, he would take a lantern, keep his hand on the rope and do his barn chores.  The rope protected him from losing his way in the storm; the blizzards were so intense that a dead reckoning error of just a few degrees would strand him, hopelessly unable to find his way back – a fatal mistake; he wouldn’t be found until the spring thaw.

Our lesson in that is this:  hold on to the rope.  Each family, each person.  Hold on to the rope.

Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation is the root of all suffering.
Margaret J. Wheatley

One of the more attractive and hopeful aspects of the human personality is our capacity for wonder, curiosity and the joy of the “Eureka” moment discovering the solution to seemingly insurmountable, vexing challenges.  A story from the past week brought this marvel to mind.

Public Broadcasting’s NOVA series ran a program about Hugh Hunt, a Cambridge University engineering professor, and his inquiry into an early WWII bombing raid by Great Britain that temporarily shut down the heartland of the Third Reich’s war equipment industry in the Ruhr Valley.  In 1942 with the war against Hitler in grave danger a British engineer, Barnes Wallis, convinced the Royal Air Force that he could breach the immense Möhne and Eder dams, which would flood coal mines and deprive the steel plants of necessary water and hydroelectric power to disrupt the production of tanks, planes and munitions for the German war machine.  Fearsome anti aircraft emplacements and the inaccuracy of bombs of the early war (only 10% hit within 5 miles of their targets) thus far had kept the dams safe.  To prevent air dropped torpedoes from reaching the dams, large, steel submarine nets were installed below the waterline across the huge lakes.  Wallis designed the famous “bouncing bombs”, code named “Upkeep”, which could skip across the water and sink adjacent to the dams, detonating after they dropped thirty feet below the surface. Delivery necessitated low level, risky flying.

On the night of May 16, 1943 a 617 RAF Squadron of 19 Lancaster bombers attacked the dams with the “Upkeep” bombs suspended beneath their fuselages. The concussive wave from their explosives, magnified by the weight of the water above them, blew out large sections of the dams and flooded the valleys.  In addition to damaging the mines and power plants, 25 bridges were washed out.  Eight bombers and fifty three members of the “Dam Busters” squadron did not survive the raid, but their success was one of the most significant of the war.

In 2011, Hugh Hunt was intrigued by how Wallis managed to skip what looked like oil drums across the water.  Most of the 1940’s notes were lost in local floods in 1960, and no one had been able to duplicate Barnes Wallis’s achievement since.  After months of meticulous research, Hunt was ready to test his theories at a remote lake in Canada.  He assembled a team that included a dam engineer and contractor to build a 30’ high model of the original dam.  They poured hundreds of concrete 2’ x 2’ x 4’ blocks that interlocked like Lego blocks, overcoming numerous design, soil type and topography problems.  First they cut a deep channel from the lake then built the dam in the middle of it.  Once it was completed, the last barrier of soil separating the channel from the lake was dug out, filling the channel behind the dam. It took six intense weeks to complete.

Two weeks of field testing in the lake required Arnie Schreder, a bush pilot with thirty years of experience, to fly his two engine WWII vintage DC-4 over 200 MPH only 50 feet above the water to achieve the necessary angle and speed of entry for the barrel.  Flying that low put the plane at risk of being damaged or even broken up by the impact splash when the barrel hit the lake.  Experiments with cement filled barrels had proven that a backspin of over 700 RPM was necessary to make them skip.  In Wallis’s version, an engine had been fitted to the bomb release mechanism under the plane to achieve the necessary spin.  Hugh Hunt devised a low budget solution that required spinning up the barrel with a large commercial drill to 1,600 RPM on the ground, and then releasing it over the lake before it slowed below 700.

At the last minute, tests proved their commercial drop mechanism designed for forest fire fighting was inadequate for the task, putting the barrel into the water at an angle, instead of the perfect parallel it required.  Two days before the crucial final drop, Hunt rented a local machine shop to alter the arms on the mount, personally cutting and welding into the night.  The day before the critical drop, Jim Bellevance, the dam contractor, stopped the leaks and finished the dam.  As each difficult hurdle was cleared, the team celebrated with shouts and hugs all around.

On the day of the final test, explosives were lowered into the water adjacent to the dam. The Canadian government’s toleration of this motley team of scientists, flyers and builders did not extend to letting them fly over sovereign territory with live bombs.  Hugh Hunt’s promise to Arnie Schreder was that if he could manage to skip the 300 pound barrel five times down the lake, into the channel and against the dam, Hunt would detonate the charge beneath it.  The crew pulled back to a safe distance and tensely watched the dénouement of a year’s planning and effort.  Arnie flew tight on the right line and low.  The barrel released perfectly and bounced hard five times and into the top of the dam.  When the dam blew, Hunt danced like a child, hugged one of his engineers and pumped his fist into the air.  No one watching could see scientists as detached and undemonstrative.

I was reminded of my 3 year old granddaughter, Gianna.  She will spend a half hour painstakingly building a Lego structure with windows, towers, bridges, cars, stairs and doors. Her intense focus is a marvel.  When it is finally finished to her satisfaction, she will look at us and her creation with great satisfaction, then delight in smashing it to oblivion.  Absolute delight.  Exultation.  The joy of simply being human.

Fair is what we see, Fairer what we have perceived, Fairest what is still in veil.

Blessed Nicolas Steno.  Father of modern geology with significant contributions to anatomy and paleontology as well.  Danish Bishop. Born January 11, 1638. Beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1988.

Wind turbines appear from a distance to rotate anywhere between indolent and enthusiastic, but in close their lethal potential is apparent.  Perfectly balanced atop a two hundred and fifty foot tower, three graceful blades encompass a diameter of nearly one hundred and forty five feet.  At the tips, they crush through the air at nearly one hundred miles an hour.  To steady powerful torque, the tower is anchored in tons of concrete.  Their whistling has been compared to the sound of a rapidly flying duck close over the water, only louder and incessant.  Clustered wind farms, located in geography with steady Class Four and Five winds, drive neighbors and wildlife to distraction.  The base of a typical tower well north of Cheyenne is littered with corpses of dead birds and bats, including sage grouse, which finds half of its North American habitat in Wyoming.  Since steady winds and large human populations are usually not found in close proximity, hundreds of miles of high voltage towers are necessary to transmit the electricity.  The wires and wind farms disrupt the routes and winter feeding grounds of migratory mammals such as antelope, elk and bison.  When the wind is becalmed, there is no power; when demand is not required for the grid, the spinning is fruitless.

The point is not that this means of generation is tilting at windmills, but that any source of power carries an environmental impact and is imperfect.  A coherent energy policy continues to elude us.   “Green” advocates condemn all power generation that consumes fossil fuels, but the alternates do not provide an answer in the midterm future.  When total expenditures for various methods of power generation including construction, fuel and production costs, waste disposal and decommissioning at the end of their effective lifetime are tallied, the costs per kilowatt hour and the percentage each represents of U.S. total generated power are as follows:

• Hydro electric:  $ .03 – 6.1%,
• Nuclear: $. 04 – 19.7%,
•  Coal:  $ .04 – 48.7%,
• Wind:  $ .08,
• Solar:  $ .22 – All renewable sources, including wind and solar: 3.0%,
• Natural gas and Petroleum: $ .10 – 22.5% (21.4% of it gas and 1.1% oil).

Given the percentages of our energy derived from hydro carbons as well as their cost advantages, it is not clear how they could be supplanted by renewables hastily without profound economic disruption.

Nuclear and hydro have their own limitations. Carving out hydro dams is disruptive, interring whole towns under millions of tons of water, and the site opportunities are limited.  Although spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed with 99% efficiency, eventually waste has to be safely stored and sealed for centuries; Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima remind us that human error or uncontrollable natural events can visit catastrophe upon wide areas.  Biofuels have been a disaster of rainforest depletion and higher food prices for those most vulnerable.   Solar cells require energy intense manufacturing similar to computer chips, and the mining of silicone and other minerals has its own inherent environmental degradation.  A solar cell must produce for almost a third of its projected life to “pay back” the energy consumed in its manufacture.

The controversy over the Keystone Pipeline and the process of horizontal drilling and “fracking” is yet another unresolved opportunity.  The enormous reserves of natural gas and oil from shale deposits in the United States and Canada have the potential to give us time to let economic forces develop alternative sources.  Yet, we remain deadlocked and even insult our friendliest neighbor.  Canada will sell their gas and oil; whether they sell to us or build an alternate outlet to their western harbors to ship to China remains to be seen.

“Fracking” may create some problems for aquifers, but the findings in Wyoming, Pennsylvania and Texas are to date inconclusive.  The only compromised well water appears to be in remote areas where old mines were revived with the process much shallower than is being done in new exploration.   When wells are drilled deep, protected by intervening horizontal geological formations and encased properly, there seems to be little risk of contaminating ground water.  Environmental activists want no use of hydro carbon based fuel, and so oppose the process and the pipeline irrespective of their real or perceived risks.  But gas burns cleaner than coal.

A “keystone” is a carved stone at the apex of an arch, that most efficient and enduring architectural element.  The keystone secures the structure and balances the opposing forces of the arch.  Perhaps this is an appropriate metaphor for a solution.  Along with converting more electrical generation and vehicles to natural gas, using our own reserves and buying from Canada, delivering it via the Keystone Pipeline to our own refineries in Houston leads us down the road to energy independence.  The pipeline has been studied in depth for three years and no serious environmental risk has been identified.  Construction of the pipeline means 20,000 jobs almost immediately.

Oil and gas production in our country with the new technology has grown jobs in this industry from 200,000 to 440,000 since 2003.  $38 billion in Federal loans under the current administration has added only 3,500 green jobs, and much of the money was wasted in Solyndra scandals and billions more in tax credits as windfalls to wind farm developers, artificially lowering their costs. Let the market sort out the efficiencies we need to solve our multifaceted energy challenges and end our dependence on unstable nations with stated intentions to destroy us.

Latin proverb:

Destitutus ventis, remos adhibe

“If the wind will not serve, take to the oars.”

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. “