Musings 03/01/2013

We had the opportunity Wednesday, February 27 to witness about 400 young men and women, including Michael, go through a formal ceremony in which they were  sworn in to various branches of the armed forces.

It was part of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo’s Armed Forces Appreciation Day activities, and while it was a moment of immense pride for me, perhaps the most meaningful part of the evening was being in the presence of those who had already sacrificed their youth to confront very real dangers to America’s security, from World War II to Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, and honoring the parents whose children had given the ultimate sacrifice. Maybe because of my dad’s service in the Navy in WWII (he was just 17 when he arrived at Pearl Harbor a day or two after the attack and found the bodies of two childhood friends) – or maybe because I’m just an old softy – I sometimes become emotional when in the presence of these men and women.

Someday soon, the 400 will be due the same debt of gratitude and respect owed to their older brothers-in-arms, my son among them.
To all of our service people – past, present, and future -”thank you”.

Can’t Help but Think (Part 1)

…in this time following the Newtown, Connecticut grade school attack, that within the concepts of the following words, although spoken to Moses for the benefit of the Israelites, can be found the cure for what ails us as a nation:

Deuteronomy 6

New International Version (NIV)

These are the commands, decrees and laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, ² so that you, your children and their children after them may fear (revere) the Lord your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life. ³ Hear, Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, promised you.

⁴ Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.^{[a] 5} Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. ⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. ⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. ⁹ Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

¹⁰ When the Lord your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, ¹¹ houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—then when you eat and are satisfied, ¹² be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

¹³ Fear the Lord your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name. ¹⁴ Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you; ¹⁵ for the Lord your God, who is among you, is a jealous God and his anger will burn against you, and he will destroy you from the face of the land. ¹⁶ Do not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Massah. ¹⁷ Be sure to keep the commands of the Lord your God and the stipulations and decrees he has given you. ¹⁸ Do what is right and good in the Lord’s sight, so that it may go well with you and you may go in and take over the good land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors, ¹⁹ thrusting out all your enemies before you, as the Lord said.

²⁰ In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” ²¹ tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. ²² Before our eyes the Lord sent signs and wonders—great and terrible—on Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. ²³ But he brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land he promised on oath to our ancestors. ²⁴ The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. ²⁵ And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.”

Thoughts?

Thoughts on the Newtown, Connecticut Shootings

(I began writing this Friday.)

It  has been a somber day. I began the day thinking about my dad, who died 5 years ago today. I thought about his dedication to his God, to his family, and to his country. I  thought about how proud he was of his 4 children and 12 grandchildren, and how proud he would have been to know that his youngest grandchild, my son, would be enlisting soon in the U.S. Navy. (My son, by the way, signed up Saturday for a 6-year term, and will leave for Boot Camp at the end of March.)

Then it became a surreal day, the memory of which will be forever clouded by the senseless deaths of 20 elementary school students and several school employees in Newton, Connecticut.

My prayers will be offered on behalf of the parents who will sit down for dinner in the days and weeks to come and stare at empty seats; who will awaken tomorrow morning and the next and the next and rush to their child’s bed with the heartbreaking hope that they’ve just awoken from a most unimaginable nightmare, only to know that it wasn’t a nightmare at all. My heart breaks for the parents who will pass by their children’s rooms and forever hear faint echos of the laughter of those they will never hold again; those who will forever see their child’s innocent face, beaming, as they run to them and say “Mommy! Daddy! Look what I drew!” I cannot imagine what they’re feeling, and hopefully I will never be able to understand that feeling. I’ll also be praying for the families of the 6 adults who died, as their families will miss them as well, and for the children and teachers who survived. I’m not a big fan of long and eloquent prayers. God knows what each of the effected families need, and who am I to tell HIM what they need?

President Obama, with whom I rarely agree,  remarked on the sense of overwhelming grief that all of America, perhaps most acutely parents, feels today, and that this type of thing has happened all too frequently over the past few years, and that “as a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it’s an elementary school in Newton, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago…we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this…” with which I agree wholeheartedly.

The conclusion to that thought; however, was ominous: “…regardless of the politics.” The events of Friday, December 14, 2012 are already serving as a clarion call for those on the side of stricter gun control laws. A New York congressman has demanded that our nation’s elected leaders “act on our outrage” to immediately enact stricter gun control laws.  However, since the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life, and the more recent Columbine shootings in 1999, gun control laws throughout the U.S. have tended to place more restrictions on ownership, with more frequent similar incidents, and that Connecticut’s are among the most stringent in the nation.

I hate drawing this comparison, but it’s valid: do we blame the carpenter or his tools for poor construction? Hammers don’t swing themselves. Saw blades cut the board, but if it’s too short, was it the saw’s fault,  or did the carpenter simply mess up? Did the pencil misspell the word, or the writer? Did the Titanic’s hull just blow open of its own accord, or was it steered too near an iceberg? How do we prevent the hammer from hitting our thumb, or a board from being too short? How do we prevent misspelled words, or ships from colliding with icebergs?

I can fully understand the New York congressman’s sentiments, but I ask you to consider whether this day would have been any less tragic if the killer had walked onto that grade school campus with a single revolver and killed only 6 children, or if he had used a knife to kill 22, as also happened was attempted Friday in China. Of course not. I ask you to consider this type of story (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuLgO4wo4xI) where armed opposition to another such psychopath seems to have encouraged an early end, or this one, courtesy of the Huffington Post  (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/18/samuel-williams-duwayne-henderson-davis-dawkins-internet-cafe-shooting_n_1682519.html), where a single armed patron turned away 2 armed would-be thieves. These armed, law-abiding citizens refused to allow more victims to be claimed.

And so I ask you to consider whether taking reactionary measures, such as banning a group of inanimate objects, will really solve the problem, or if perhaps the real solution is to be found by honestly reviewing the gradual landslide of changes in our society’s collective conscience over the past 30 or 40 years and developing a plan to reverse those changes and restore our national conscience.

2012 Election Post Mortem

I’ve heard all sorts of reasons, and many excuses, to make sense of President Obama’s reelection. I was disappointed, but only a little surprised.

Much of it is bitterness. Bitterness for “not putting a real conservative on the ticket;” bitterness at several Tea Party candidates whose poor communication skills may have indeed alienated a few million previously undecided voters; bitterness at conservative Christians who may have “decided to stay home rather than vote for a Mormon”; bitterness at President Obama for pandering to special interests to “buy” the election, and even bitterness at young voters who just “seem to want everything handed to them.”

I will not address here Mr. Romney’s qualifications as a conservative. There are many factors to weigh, but I am of the opinion that the main factor was that many conservatives applied “presidential-level” litmus tests in error to his term as governor of Massachusetts.

In regards to the second point: In today’s world, a conservative candidate will be raked over the coals regarding “women’s reproductive rights” and the homosexual agenda. Conservatives had better be ready for the questions, and your answers better be well-formulated and fundamentally sound. For Tea Party candidates, it’s of even greater importance, because the media is going to try even harder to make you look stupid. And would-be candidates should be honest with themselves. If they do not handle spontaneous questions well, or cannot speak spontaneously without having to apologize for unintended slights, they should think again about running, because those clumsy answers will be pounced on and extended to all conservatives.

To those who just didn’t vote because of Mr. Romney’s religion, he’s a good, morally upright, honest person whose religious beliefs are not totally unaligned with your own beliefs. Your refusal to vote may have had a hand in Obama’s reelection.

I suppose “buying the election” depends on which side you’re on, doesn’t it? But the fact that so many voters don’t understand or even try to comprehend basic economics is quite disheartening. The belief that taxing the pants off of the wealthy will somehow fund our entitlement-bent President’s agenda has been proven  ridiculous. It’s been said before: A democracy will collapse under the weight of its own spending once the electorate realizes that it can effectively vote itself money from the public treasury.

Which brings me to my final thought:

Where did younger voters get the idea that they are entitled to everything they want, as soon as they want it? I was asking myself this question long before the 2012 election, and the answer has finally dawned on me.

But first I want to ask you something, fellow boomers: why wasn’t what we had good enough for our own children? Our parents naturally wanted this for us. Many of them had grown up during the Great Depression, and often didn’t have enough food, and wondered where they’d be sleeping at night. Most of us didn’t have those issues, so why do we feel that our kids have to have it better than we did?

Were we deprived because many of our families only had 1 television set in the house, and many households had “only” 2 cars? We survived, thank you very much, in smaller homes sharing bedrooms (and in many cases single bathrooms), and we looked upon “extras” graciously because they weren’t commonplace. Most of us went to church with our families each week, and if we caused a ruckus at school, we would suffer the consequences. We took car vacations back then, and from them, learned real tolerance; not the “embrace diversity” variety that the schools and media are force-feeding us today.

Then somewhere along the way, after we grew up, WE changed. We bought more than we could afford: houses, cars, toys. We began ignoring time-tested values that had kept families strong for generations, through thick and thin. We got lazy and stopped training our kids, letting them decide right and wrong for themselves, and then when they got in trouble, we wondered why and blamed the teachers. When things at home weren’t as slick as glass, we left. We left spouses. We left children, and then to fill the voids in our lives and theirs, we turned to “stuff”. We buy our kids stuff we think they’ll want, even if they haven’t expressed a desire for it. We just see that “Johnny’s dad bought him…” and we buy it for our kids.

So where did they learn to expect everything to be handed to them? We just need to look in the mirror.