Guide For Killing Christians

Veterans of various Middle East conflicts have advised us not to go to Israel this spring, but I’m holding out. After all, there have been conflicts there throughout recorded history. “A group of Americans traveling on a bus in the West Bank would be a tempting target,” said a Navy Seal officer in San Diego last month where two of my sisters went to attend my nephew Mike’s graduation. Our itinerary would take us to Bethlehem, Masada, the Dead Sea, and Qumran - to the caves where the ancient Essenes hid the Dead Sea Scrolls - and all these are in the West Bank. There would be several days in Jerusalem and several days in northern Israel as well.

My sisters and my wife took the tour in May, 2000 and they want to go back with us, their husbands. We were supposed to go in October, but Hezbollah was rocketing Tiberius and Caesaria in the north. Now, Hamas has announced they will be targeting Americans for death because of our support of Israel.

On October 31st, Al Qaeda released an updated version of “A Guide for the Undecided on the Legitimacy of Killing Christians.” It promises that more attacks against America are coming soon and offers both an historical and theological rationale for killing Christians everywhere, especially Americans. Not good.

Weeks earlier, Al Qaeda released a manual titled “How to Fight Alone.” Frontpagemagazine.com describes it as “a how-to guide for Muslims to conduct their own ‘Jihad of One’ against the ‘Crusader-Zionists’ . . .[with] instructions on how lone Muslims can take the battle to the infidels.” Hmm. The infidels. That would be us on a bus. Crusaders without weapons.

Recommended methods for lone jihadists include “stabbing, feeding overdoses of cocaine or heroin, injecting air via needles, assassination with guns, burning down homes, putting poisonous snakes in cars, tampering with car brakes, planting explosives in vehicles, running over people, and luring people and then killing them.”

That’s not all. “The book also highly recommends poisoning targets and includes various methods of preparing and obtaining lethal toxins, including botulism. The book also gives instructions on making improvised explosives.”

It’s been over six years since the female members of my family made their pilgrimage. The September 11th attacks occurred sixteen months later and Palestinians all over Gaza and the West Bank danced in the streets when they heard the news. Why? Obviously they were happy Americans were massacred by Arab Muslims like them. The Palestinian Authority threatened western journalists who recorded the celebrations, saying they couldn’t guarantee their safety if the images were broadcast.

Here in the United States, most Americans believe a few radicals hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only Muslims we have to worry about. Any others who hate us are justified by American foreign policy, they insist. Newspaper editors who profess to champion free speech worry interminably about offending Muslims if they publish children’s cartoons of Muhammad, though they have no qualms publishing photos of a crucifix in urine or the Virgin Mary in elephant dung. Though there have been few if any attacks on Muslims in the United States, they fret about the invented syndrome “Islamophobia,” as if any American fear of Islam is irrational.

Some of us, however, are coming to believe that the only irrational fear Americans have about Islam is the fear of taking a hard look at what it is becoming. We keep repeating that Islam is a religion of peace in spite of mounting evidence that it isn’t anymore, if it ever was. We go to great lengths to deny what is staring us in the face - that Islamic terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and all the rest are very popular with Muslims all around the world. That diplomatic approaches to the Palestinian problem, the Iraqi problem, the Syrian problem and the Iranian problem amount to little but appeasement and will only postpone an inevitable showdown. We’re deathly afraid that we may well have to use our overwhelming military power to destroy our enemies. That’s what we really fear, so we continue trying to appease them. Winston Churchill summed it up a half-century ago. “The appeaser,” he said, “feeds the crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last.”

It should be pretty clear by now that a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank and Gaza is not going to appease Muslims. They want Israel gone. That’s what conservative Israelis have claimed all along but we didn’t believe it. Now we do. After 9-11 and a three years in Iraq, we know our enemies and Israel’s are the same. They will not run out of suicide bombers and they will soon have nukes if they don’t already. It’s not a matter of whether they’ll use them against Israel and against us, but when. All it will take is one to wipe out Israel and nobody knows that better than Israel.

Israelis understand crocodiles better than Americans or Europeans do. Their long history has taught them. They’re not going to feed it much longer and they’ve had nuclear weapons for decades in preparation for exactly the threat now looming. Have I painted the picture clearly enough?

Images and Power

Picture day in middle school can be disruptive with students missing class to pose in the gym, but when the pictures come back it can get crazy. It’s best to distribute them at the end of the day. When I bring them out around dismissal time, students crowd around. Each package has a cellophane window displaying an 8X12 of a student’s face and some will grab at the package as soon as they see themselves. Then they rush to the periphery like a seagull with a morsel being chased by other students who want to get a look. Shy kids bite their lips as they wait on the fringe and then hide their package under their shirts as soon as they get it.

If I should ever take out a camera in front of any class, some students will stretch themselves toward the lens and ham it up while others will hide their faces. Human behavior changes when a camera is present. Some people get self-conscious, put on a stressed out face, and seldom produce a good picture. Tell them to smile and you get a grimace. A good photographer, though, can get the images he wants. He shoots what he likes and ignores what he doesn’t. In the edit room, the process is perfected.

Pictures are powerful. The image-makers can make people look good or make them look bad. I got an email recently called “Why Most Men Are Republicans” with attractive photos of Republican women like Peggy Noonan, Laura Ingraham, Bo Derek and Janine Turner and a few others. Below them is a set of very unflattering shots of Barbara Streisand, Helen Thomas, Susan Estrich, Janet Reno and several other Democrat women. It’s a very effective example of what selective shooting and editing portrays - not reality, but spin.

Weekly newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek are using fewer candid photos and more staged ones. It’s obvious that subjects are posed to portray a mood as they stare at the lens. Editors have a point of view on a given story, using photos that reflect it most effectively and the results display little evidence of objectivity. The Associated Press and Reuters use stringers in the Middle East who are anything but unbiased in what they shoot, how they shoot, or how they edit.

The most ubiquitous shots are of angry Muslims burning American flags and it’s obvious they’re playing to the camera. First they burn it, then they stomp on it while others shake their fists. A critical viewer can almost hear a director shout “Lights-Camera-Action!” before each scene. So what’s the point? Muslims hate the United States. We get it. But why indulge them? Why does our media play along and give power to it week after week, year after year?

And what about that CNN tape of an American soldier getting shot by an enemy sniper team with a rifle and a video camera? CNN’s Baghdad correspondent was in contact with terrorists who slipped him the tape. We heard the snipers talking and then saw the American soldier slump in his vehicle. Why would CNN show this? Whose side are they on? This is the prostitute news network that censored itself to remain in Baghdad after the first Gulf War. After one of their cameramen was tortured, they only released what Saddam would approve - all the while pretending their reporting was objective. Now this. It’s outrageous. “CNN - The Most Trusted Name in News.” Yeah, right.

Our terrorist enemies couldn’t manipulate our media unless it was willing. There’s a symbiosis between terrorists and media whores. When Israel, America’s greatest ally in the region, was attacked by Hezbollah and Hamas last summer, nearly every mainstream media outlet in the western world broadcast an outrageous story that Israeli warplanes deliberately fired missiles at two Lebanese ambulances performing rescue operations. Though it was almost certainly a propaganda stunt staged by Hezbollah, our media played it up big. The fraud was exposed by alert bloggers including Zombie (http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/), but too late to affect the outcome of the war. Israel was forced to pull out before destroying Hezbollah. Iran and Syria have since rearmed them and fighting will break out again soon. My scheduled trip to Israel had to be postponed and will likely have to be postponed again.

We know “The pen is mightier than the sword,” but a camera can be mightier than an army. It has great power and power corrupts. Our mainstream media is drunk with it.

Gasping Gonads

Sometimes I fear Americans don’t have what it takes anymore, especially men in blue states like Massachusetts. But it didn’t use to be like that. They’ve gotten soft after years of feeling guilty about having so much in a world where so many have so little. Such thinking presumes the amount of wealth on earth is fixed, and because you have a lot, someone else is going without. Americans who think this way don’t believe that we built what we have by hard work and we deserve it, or that other parts of the world would do better to emulate us rather than resent us because they could do it too.

We used to think American culture was special. As children, we cheered watching Superman fight for “truth, justice, and the American Way.” We knew he wasn’t real, but we believed the American Way was pretty terrific, that it worked better than what other countries had, and that our strength, our inventiveness and our prosperity were the results. We invented the airplane, the light bulb, the television, and countless other things the whole world enjoys. Heck, we put a man on the moon.

In the 20th century, America became the greatest power on earth, but we didn’t create an empire. After trying to stay out of World War I, we tipped the balance against Germans and Turks. Though allies like England and France divided the spoils and added to their empires, we didn’t.

When Europe got into a mess again and Japan was taking over Asia, who bailed out the world? We did. Again, we tried for years to stay out of it, but we were attacked. So, we pulverized our enemies, then demanded nothing less than unconditional surrender. That was the American Way back then. When the war ended, we had our military deployed everywhere and nearly every other country was crippled. Our infrastructure was intact and we had sole possession of nuclear weaponry, yet we still didn’t create an empire. What did we do instead? We established and reestablished democracies in countries which had been our enemies and helped them rebuild. There’s no precedent for such unselfishness by such a powerful nation in all of recorded history.

In spite of this, many in the generation born after World War II condemn our country’s legacy. They run our universities now and instead of celebrating our proud history, they teach instead that our leaders have been selfish white men who’ve done little but oppress women, minorities, homosexuals and third-world countries everywhere. They insist that all cultures are equal, men and women are the same, there’s no such thing as absolute truth, right and wrong are relative, and the American Way is hated around the world. ROTC programs and military recruiters are banned from campuses. There are more colleges per square mile in the Boston area than anyplace on earth, so these attitudes are quite prevalent in Massachusetts.

Perhaps worst of all, they’ve permeated primary and secondary schools with their views. They try to raise our boys to believe that there’s no difference between them and little girls. If two boys fight, both are punished, even if one is a bully and the other is defending himself. They teach that fighting is always bad, even after you’re attacked. Parents of boys who don’t want to behave like the girls are encouraged to feed their sons prescription drugs. If the boys still manage to grow into men who still resist such “progressive” thinking, they’re forced to undergo “sensitivity training,” especially in such blue-state strongholds as Massachusetts, New York and San Francisco.

Now we’ve discovered that men in Massachusetts are losing testosterone. According to a recent study of 1700 Boston-area men in the January, 2007 Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and reported by Reuters, testosterone levels have dropped about one percent a year since the 1980s. “It’s likely that some sort of environmental exposure is responsible for the testosterone decline,” said Dr. Thomas Travison of the New England Research Institutes.

Environmental exposure indeed. What kind of environment have the “progressives” created down there in Massachusetts? What should we expect from a place where they don’t want to keep score at soccer games, where dodge ball and tag are banned from elementary schools, and homosexual “marriage” is invented? Looks like I got out just in time. Boys will be boys if they’re allowed to be. Raise them an environment that tries to turn them into girls and this is what you get. I’m guessing the “Boston-area men” were from Cambridge.

The article went on: “‘[Testosterone in] The entire population is shifting somewhat downward we think,’ Travison told Reuters Health. ‘We’re counting on other studies to confirm this.’” I have some suggestions, Dr. Travison. Do a red-state study in the middle of the United States away from the coasts. There you’ll find testosterone at rates you’d expect in men who haven’t been sissified. Then do another study in the San Francisco area. I suspect you’ll discover that testosterone there has declined to barely measurable levels. Lastly, compare your results with the new electoral map after Tuesday’s election and see if any correllations emerge.

If our new blue-state Congress forces a pullout from Iraq and the terrorists gain strength, will we still have what it takes to defeat our enemies? Time was we did. Now, I’m not sure.

Stormy Signs

An “Olympia Snowe for Senate” sign bounced off my hood as I waited at an intersection in Portland, Maine. Blustery winds blew leaves and campaign signs all around the city. I ran over one declaring “Baldacci for Governor” as the wind skittered it across the road and under my tires. A “Curley for Congress” sign twisted on one of its two wire legs after a gust tore the other from the earth. Weather and politics were in tumult.

A huge maple uprooted and crashed through the roof of a house next to my daughter’s on Wellington Street. I was there for the christening of Alexander John Kimble, my second grandson. The Kimbles and the McLaughlins gathered to witness the oldest Christian rite for this newest member of both our families. I remembered learning in catechism class a half century ago that Baptism cleansed us from original sin - that stain left on us after Adam and Eve disobeyed God. It seemed fitting that our purpose was to acknowledge our place and Alex’s in the spiritual world - that realm older than electoral politics and even nature itself, both of which were in turmoil that day.

How will it be for Alex as he grows up in his world, I wondered, and how will his be different from the world I’ve known? Will he be challenged as a Catholic American? Will he have to defend his heritage against Islamic onslaught? Will his generation fight to preserve it?

Entering the church later, I saw dead leaves which had blown into the narthex and were strewn around the floor. My son-in-law, Nate, had chosen his brother, Michael Kimble, as Alex’s Godfather and I recalled the Baptism scene in Coppola’s film “The Godfather.” Michael Corleone was asked “Do you renounce Satan? And all his works?” Coppola cut away after each question to scenes of Corleone’s rivals being violently slain. I remembered the brittle clouds of leaves blowing and swirling through the streets outside, and thought of the way directors used such scenes to portend evil forces prowling about. Are there sinister forces lurking in our world? President Bush claims an “Axis of Evil” threatens us and he’s ridiculed by “progressive” Democrats like those who dominate politics in Portland, Maine and in the rest of the red states. They consider such talk unenlightened at best and the president himself a simpleton. They see this election as a referendum on Bush’s vision of what threatens us.

If Republicans retain Congress next week, President Bush may take it as a vote of confidence and be more aggressive against the jihadists ordered to “kill Americans - anywhere, anyhow.” If Democrats win control, they could cut off funding for the war as they did in Vietnam thirty years ago. The Democratic left believes President Bush’s aggressive policies have not reduced terrorism but produced more. They would pull out and “Give Peace a Chance,” because, as their bumper stickers say, “War is Not The Answer.” They don’t realize that war is only the extension of politics when diplomacy fails. You either win or you lose - and we cannot afford to lose. It may not seem like a holy war for blue state “progressives” who snicker at such talk, but there can be no doubt that our enemies see it that way. They’re on a mission from God, to quote from another movie - the “Blues Brothers” - but their mission isn’t the least bit funny.

I’ve been surprised recently by how many otherwise intelligent people speculate that the World Trade Center towers were not brought down by Muslim terrorists, but by controlled demolition charges planted in the buildings by US government officials. They’re ready to believe the Bush Administration knew in advance about the attacks and allowed them as a reason to go to war. I thought only the lunatic fringe could conceive of such things, but I’ve been wrong. Such notions are more widespread than I would ever have believed possible. It’s sad to realize how divided we are in the face of our enemies. I fear sometimes the “United States” is becoming a misnomer and it may take a nuclear attack next time to make us realize the danger we face.

The storms of war will likely intensify whatever the outcome next week. If we pull out of Iraq, Islamofascists will see it as yet another victory over the infidels, the “Great Satan.” That’s how they see us by the way, in case you haven’t heard.

It’s fitting that my grandson’s Baptism prepares him for the next world as well as this one. I fear the political signs I saw flying around on that stormy Sunday could well be an omen of upheaval, political and religious. The world Alex Kimble was christened into will be not likely be peaceful.

Going Inward

Take down the screens. Bring in the firewood. There’s snow on Mount Washington and it’s time to go inward. People who don’t like this are packing up to go south if they haven’t left already. As Tom Rush put it, they got the urge for goin’. Although it can get tiresome in March, I like being inside during late fall and early winter. I feel different outside too. Wearing flannel-lined pants, a quilted shirt and wool socks, I’m protected against the elements inside my clothing even if a chill wind reddens my cheeks. A whiff of woodsmoke from someone’s chimney turns my thoughts to home and if I smell something cooking as I go back inside it feels even better.

New Englanders are accustomed to changing seasons, having four distinct ones every year. Though we see more transformation, each season unfolds in customary ways with familiar sights, sounds and smells bringing memories of seasons past. Autumn chills make us grateful for warm, dry homes and hot food. It’s no wonder Thanksgiving originated here. If we should forget what’s really important, we’re reminded more often than people in many other regions. Changing seasons put us through familiar cycles and, I think, help us to accept the cycles of life more graciously than we otherwise might.

We go to bed hours after it’s dark in these latitudes and a lot of us wake up before it gets light. There’s something about seeing stars still in the sky as the eastern horizon is just starting to become visible. I feel I have time to get ready for the day, that I’ll be able to deal with it as it unfolds. By the time it’s light enough to see, I’m showered, dressed, and drinking coffee.

Daylight is more precious as it diminishes quickly in November. We savor the dim glow before sunrise, the twilight after dusk and evening’s bright starlight. The Milky Way on a cold, clear autumn night will mesmerize whoever turns his eyes upward. Unlike some city folk who seldom if ever see stars, we who live in the woods of northern New England know that they really do twinkle. Usually I’m out in the yard at such times and I can look back at the house and see into the lighted windows. Use to be it was full of children. Now they’re grown and out in the world somewhere, but under the same stars.

Inside, we contemplate things at fireside. Deeper thoughts and feelings come while watching flames turn to embers. Conversation is subtle, personal. Going out into the cold for another armload of wood and returning to fireside renews contentment. We don’t forget the tumult of the wider world, but it’s way out there beyond the town. There are layers between us and it. We can keep it out there and be safe for a time. Then sleep will come and take us to a new day.

Inside, we read. We write letters because writing is personal. It’s still a conversation but we don’t loose trains of thought because the words are right there. We take time to write because the reader will focus as much as the writer. And if he wants, he can go over the words again or share them with others.

This morning, even Baldface is white. Early wet snows like yesterday’s will soak through my workboots if I don’t treat them with mink oil. An old toothbrush works to apply the stuff and it needs to absorb overnight next to the fire or over a furnace vent. With a good pair of merino wool socks, treated workboots will do for autumn. I have 50-below Sorels for deep winter, but they stayed in the closet last season because deep cold and snow never came. Might need them this year though. Winter’s coming, but I’m ready. Going inward for a while is a good thing.

Defending Maine and America

Mohammed Atta woke up in a motel room on the coast of Maine the morning of September 11th. A few hours later, much of our national security apparatus, both offense and defense, became obsolete. Maine’s old coastal forts are symbols of that. There are quite a few up and down the coast. Three were built within a few hundred feet of each other over a span of 350 years near Popham Beach. None were ever attacked. All three are evidence of the admonition: “If you want peace, prepare for war,” and they represent the highest and best use of any military equipment - that they exist but are not utilized.

Exploring them, my wife and I found ourselves at the site of the first English colony in New England - the Popham colony founded in 1607 in what is now the town of Phippsburg at the mouth of the Kennebec River. There’s nothing there now but a small parking lot and a sign with a drawing of Fort St. George as it was four centuries ago. Its settlers were prepared for a French attack by sea and relied on ramparts and cannon for defense. What defeated them was not the French, however, but Maine’s winter. They abandoned the fort after little more than a year. Across a small cove to the east are the remains of Fort Popham a hundred yards away. It was begun in 1861 but abandoned in 1869. Precisely-cut granite stones lay around still waiting to be lifted into place. Bolts protrude from the floor to receive artillery pieces never needed because the British never entered the war and the South surrendered. Closer to Fort St. George but invisible behind trees are the remains of Fort Baldwin, built before World War I and expanded during World War II. It too is only about a hundred yards away and up a hill to the south. All three forts relied on ramparts and artillery and each is typical for its time.

The threats Maine and America faced altered relatively little for four centuries, but everything changed when the 21st century began. On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, Mohammed Atta woke up at the Comfort Inn in South Portland, a few miles south of the three forts. Hours later, nothing was the same. The danger faced by Maine, the United States, and all of western civilization rendered fortifications of little benefit. Artillery isn’t entirely useless though as Maine’s Army National Guard employs it in Iraq in a forward defense strategy - better to kill terrorists in their homeland before they attack civilians here. Our enemies could still hit the United States but haven’t because they’re busy fighting our soldiers nearer their own countries. The best defense has always been a good offense.

Instead, terrorists are attacking Europe. France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, Holland, Belgium and Spain are under virtual siege. Europeans attracted millions of Muslim immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, then encouraged them to preserve their way of life in what they thought would be multicultural bliss. Now, many immigrants and their offspring are more inspired by Islamofascist terrorist groups like Al Qaeda than by the European Union’s Constitution. They apply sharia law in sections of French cities where they live on the dole but resist secular authority. Every night, they burn cars and attack those police officers who still try to preserve order. As a result, many police, firemen and ambulances are unwilling to enter Muslim sections of cities across Europe. Radical Muslims exercise de facto control of large areas. In Malmo - Sweden’s third largest city - Muslims will soon comprise the majority of the population and half are on welfare. This is what multiculturalism has wrought - not tolerance and acceptance, but a clash of civilizations. One French Police union calls it the “European Intifada.”

Meanwhile, birth rates of native Europeans have fallen to way below replacement levels while birthrates of Muslim immigrants are huge. Should those trends continue - and they show no sign of abating - Europe as we’ve known it will cease to exist in little more than a generation. It will become “Eurabia.”

Mohammed Atta woke up in South Portland, Maine September 11th, but he came to the United States from Hamburg, Germany (Muslim population 200,000) after training with Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Shoe bomber Richard Reid, arrested at Logan Airport a little further down the coast, is British. “Twentieth hijacker” Zacarias Moussawi is French. Testimony before the US House Subcommittee on Europe and Emerging Threats states: “[Of] 373 radical Muslim terrorists arrested or killed in Europe and the United States from 1993 through 2004 . . . an astonishing 41 percent were Western nationals, who were either naturalized or second generation Europeans, or were converts to Islam. . . . Future terrorist attacks that will be damaging to American national security are therefore likely to have a European connection.” It’s much easier for terrorists to come here with European passports than with Middle Eastern ones.

Against this kind of threat, border fences, terrorist profiling by airports, Coast Guard vessels, immigration officials and the Homeland Security apparatus would be far more effective security than the old ramparts-and-cannon approach. After securing our borders, we must reimpose the Melting Pot model on immigration policy. Multiculturalism has been a disaster for Europe but it’s not too late yet to scrap it in the United States.

Breaking Routine

My routine had been broken. I broke it. In spite of all I had to do, I persuaded my wife to explore part of the Maine coast with me. In spite of all she had to do, she accompanied me. We did it my way - without a specific plan about where we were going to stay for the two nights we’d be gone from our bed. The general destination was Bath and the peninsula to the south. The weather was great as I drove down every road, walked through every cemetery and read every historic marker. She found eight sand dollars on the beach. Of the two restaurants in which we ate dinner, one was okay and the other was first-rate.

We returned Sunday. Instead of beginning my column while watching the Patriots’ game as would have been my habit in the fall, I caught up on some of the caretaking work, figuring I still had Monday, Columbus Day, to write. When I sat on the porch with my laptop, however, it wasn’t flowing. I hadn’t enough time to process all that I’d seen and done and there was no logical sequence to what was emerging as my fingers manipulated the keyboard. Maybe I wouldn’t submit anything this week.

Sometimes it helped if I got up and did something else because when I sat back down, it would flow. I went into the kitchen and made some spaghetti sauce in the crock pot and returned to my laptop, but it didn’t work. My grandson was on the porch with me playing quietly with some construction toys while his mother worked a 12-hour shift at Bridgton Hospital. He smelled the sauce and asked when dinner would be ready. My wife was puttering around her flower garden below us and the sun was getting ready to set over Kearsarge Mountain to the west. Brilliant golden rays backlit her silver hair as she moved about. The maples below the field were bright yellow and red, and with every little puff of breeze, hundreds of leaves drifted gently down from the three big ash trees around her garden. It was quiet enough that I could hear a little crackle as each leaf as it came down on others already fallen.

Seeing this, my grandson forgot his appetite and said, “Let’s go out and catch them!” His eyes were so bright I couldn’t say “No. I have to write this column,” though it was almost on my tongue. Instead, I said, “Yeah, let’s go!” We ran back through the house and out, trying to reach the leaves before they hit the ground but we were too late. He was disappointed, but I said, “Wait. They’ll start falling again as soon as the air moves.” Soon, trees on the hillside below began to move slightly and another cascade of ash leaves drifted down on us, some in clumps of three or four. We scurried about catching as many as we could. For a few minutes at least, he brought out the six-year-old boy in me which had been cooped up too long.

So much wonder showed on his face in the horizontal autumn sun that I went back inside for my camera. The laptop was still on the chair, but I went back out to record images instead of words. As he scampered and rolled around the leaf-covered grass, I clicked over a hundred. He was so caught up that no self-consciousness entered his countenance as I attempted to preserve the moments. Then I used the laptop to take in pictures instead of putting out words. The sun had set below Kearsarge. The horizon and clouds above were backlit and darkness creeped in as I examined each image on the screen. There wasn’t a bad one in the bunch and I burned a CD for his mother.

Routines are good when it comes to eating and sleeping, but breaking patterns can be good for us too and I have the pictures to prove it, each worth a thousand proverbial words.

Wimpy Infidels

I’m a proud infidel and I won’t apologize. There are bumper stickers on my car and on my truck declaring that. Therefore, there are people who want to kill me and my response is - bring it on. As a public service to my readers I’m informing you that if you’re not a Muslim either, there are people out there who want to kill you too and they’re willing to die in the effort. It won’t help that you may be a sensitive, nuanced, caring pacifist whose bumper stickers say “War is not the Answer” or “Kerry/Edwards ’04” or that you’ve completed advanced sensitivity training courses, or that you’re a staunch promoter of multiculturalism and call Islamofascists “militants” instead of “terrorists.” They’ll kill you anyway. If you’re jewish, you’re at the top of their hit list. They were taught in elementary school that Jews are the descendants of pigs and dogs.

The only thing that will get you off the hit list is a conversion to Islam. That means you have to abandon beliefs that homosexuality is normal, that sex outside of marriage is okay and that men and women are equal. You also have to give up constitutional rights like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, protection against cruel and unusual punishment, habeus corpus, bail, trial by jury, and so on. If you should ever decide you don’t want to be a Muslim anymore, you would be an apostate. The penalty for apostates is death.

You still think war is not the answer though and you want to negotiate with them, right? Good luck. We tried that for more than twenty years before September 11th. You could ask Jimmy Carter about negotiating with radical Muslims. He tried for 444 days back in 1979/80. The mad mullahs of Iran humiliated Carter and he lost his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan. Then, just to rub salt in his wounds, the mullahs released the American hostages on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. Were the mullahs afraid of what Reagan might do when he became president? Maybe, but they needn’t have been. After declaring during his campaign that he would never do it, he was soon negotiating also, trying to secure the release of other American hostages taken by Iran’s shadow army, Hezbollah. Then Hezbollah killed 400 US Marines with a truck bomb at Beirut airport and Reagan meekly withdrew US forces from Lebanon. Reagan talked tough, but he put his tail between his legs when things got difficult.

Few Americans noticed that at the time, but radical Muslims around the world sure did and they made plans to hit us harder. Reagan, Bush the Elder and Clinton suffered further hits but none of them made a decisive move against our enemies. Bush the Younger didn’t either until after September 11th.

Islamofascists hate western civilization. They’re willing to kill and die to destroy it. But how about us westerners? Are we willing to die defending it? Do we believe enough in our way of life to kill them before they kill us? It doesn’t look like it. Too many Americans hate western civilization too. Our colleges and universities have been scrapping western civ courses for decades. “Who wants to learn about all those dead white guys?” they ask. Military recruiters and ROTC programs are banned from our elite colleges. Professors like Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado believe our enemies have been right to kill us. Hundreds of professors from all over the country sign petitions in support of Churchill. Osama Bin Laden’s number two man, Ayman Zawahiri, says President Bush is a liar and a failure on videotape, but you hear the same thing from radical professors on almost any campus in America. You can read it on liberal Democrat web sites and hear it from Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi too. Depending on the day, Zawahiri sounds just like Michael Moore or Ted Kennedy. Does that mean I’m questioning their patriotism? Darn right. Their courage too.

The world view of so many European and American liberals is that people from North Africa and the Middle East have been oppressed by western countries, that Bush and Cheney are terrorists and Muslims are victims, that all cultures are equal, that war is not the answer and give peace a chance. What’s slowly becoming apparent to them lately is that their dearly-held beliefs aren’t useful when trying to understand Islamofascist hatred of western civilization. They simply don’t apply anymore, if they ever did. When liberal elites in Europe and America say, “I hate western civilization too,” it doesn’t endear them to our enemies. Concepts like cultural relativism and moral equivalence have no currency in this struggle. Islamofascists have special disdain for those who don’t believe in anything strongly enough to die for it.

To Islamofascists, liberals are just wimpy infidels who will be easier to kill than the proud ones.

El Diablo?

“Chavez Says President Bush Is ‘The Devil’” read the headline of a newspaper I held up to the class. Going over to a wall map of the world I said, “Hugo Chavez is president of Venezuela, right here. We buy 12% our oil from Venezuela and that country gets rich from our purchases. Chavez was making a speech at the United Nations building in New York City yesterday.”

Looking at students’ faces as I was speaking, I could see that only about half were interested. “As Chavez was speaking at the podium, he sniffed the air and said he smelled sulfur. Why would he say that?” I asked.

No hands. Only blank looks. That’s how it is early in the school year. Few of them have any idea of what is going on in the world beyond school. That would take several weeks to change.

“Sulfur is the stuff on a match tip that flares when you strike it,” I said. “Why would Chavez sniff the air during his speech and say he smelled sulfur?” Still no hands, but a few wrinkled their foreheads as they thought about it. “If Bush is the devil as Chavez claims, where would he live?”

“In hell?” asked a girl nervously.

“Exactly,” I said. “In hell where it’s hot? Matches? Sulfur?”

“Oh, I get it,” she said. Others looked at each other and smiled.

“Chavez called Bush the devil yesterday. Today, he’s giving a press conference in Harlem, a section of New York City.” I turned on the classroom television to see Chavez in a bright read shirt sitting in a church and playing awkwardly with a young girl. He was wearing a bright red shirt.” That’s him, right there,” I said. Soon a black man walked over to him and they hugged. “That’s the actor, Danny Glover,” I said.

“He was in ‘Lethal Weapon,’ right?”

“That’s right.”

“Chavez is also good buddies with Fidel Castro,” I said, “the communist dictator of Cuba.” I walked back over to the wall map and pointed out Cuba. “Chavez says he isn’t a communist, but a socialist,” I explained, “but others claim he is a communist. He’s wearing a red shirt and red is a symbol of communism, but that could just be a coincidence.”

During the first week of school, I passed out a left-right political spectrum chart indicating communists and socialists on the extreme left, Nazis on the extreme right, with Democrats and Republicans on either side of center. Students had to study the chart to determine which political party they agreed with most and which they disagreed with most. Several declared on a test that they disagreed most with the communist party and none agreed with it. That usually changes later in the year when we study communism in more depth. Then, some students think it’s a good thing.

“So, Chavez called President Bush ‘the devil’ or ‘el diablo’ yesterday and he got a lot of applause from representatives of many small nations. What do you think?”

No hands.

“Do you agree with him? Do any of you think President Bush is the devil?” I asked.

Surprisingly, about six students raised their hands. “Why?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t agree with anything he does,” said a girl.

“Okay, you disagree with him. But does that mean he’s the devil?”

“Well, I don’t really think he’s the devil,” she said. “But I’m angry that he started the war in Iraq.”

“Is that what the rest of you think?” I asked.

They nodded.

“So you don’t actually think he’s the devil either?”

They shook their heads.

The following week, Hugo Chavez went back to Venezuela where he was quoted in a local newspaper claiming that the papers he used on the podium at the United Nations were contaminated because President Bush had used the same podium the day before. Chavez was treating his papers with holy water. He also claimed that President Bush had given orders to have him killed. I printed the article and showed it to students. “It appears that Chavez wasn’t just trying to make a point when he claimed Bush is the devil, but actually believes it,” I said.

“He sounds pretty loopy to me,” said a boy. “How does someone like that become president of a country?”

“At first, he used the military to take over the previous government there,” I explained. “Then he was elected by the people of Venezuela several times.”

“Jeez,” said the boy.

Gonads Gone?

There are over a billion Muslims in the world, about one out of five people. Not all are jihadists who want to destroy Israel and the United States, but how many? One percent? Ten percent? Half? Nobody really knows but it’s a very important question. Even if it’s one percent, that’s ten million. When news of September 11th spread around Muslim countries, there was a lot of celebrating in the streets. Were most Muslims glad we were attacked or was there only a small minority celebrating in the streets that day? Is there a “silent majority”? Hard to say.

Some analysts claim our enemies belong to a fast-growing group within Islam variously labelled Islamofascists, Jihadists, Islamists, and so on. President Bush’s strategy is to establish Muslim democracies to give a presumed silent majority voting power. But in Palestine, Muslim voters elected a terrorist group called Hamas to run the Palestine Authority. What will happen in Lebanon’s next election? Will Hezbollah win control? Both groups call for the destruction of Israel and the United States.

Bernard Lewis, America’s foremost historian of the Muslim world, says jihadist, radical Islam was first espoused by an Arab named Wahhab in the 18th century. Wahhab was allied to the House of Saud which eventually conquered Arabia. When oil was discovered there in the early 20th century, the Saudis gained power and so did Wahhabism by association. Our petrodollars fund its propagation. Last April, Lewis said Wahhabism is to Islam what the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity. If he’s right and I hope he is, jihadist Islam will be bothersome for a time, but fade away to the wacky fringe as the Klan has but I’m not confident it will.

The KKK got fairly strong in the south after the Civil War and spread north a few decades later. Mainstream Christian leaders, however, publicly condemned it. Ordinary Christians were horrified by KKK terror tactics and said so openly. Yet I’m hearing very little condemnation of Jihadist terror from Muslim clerics or Muslims in general. Instead, we see them burning American flags, Israeli flags and Danish flags. They jump around, yell, shake their fists, burn President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI in effigy, behead captives and blow themselves up to kill infidels all over the world. In European cities, Muslim minorities demonstrate with signs exclaiming: “Behead Those Who Insult Islam” and “Kill Those Who Insult Islam.” Now they want to kill the pope.

I’ve learned a lot from Bernard Lewis but I have to ask myself: was he downplaying Jihadist strength? He made the KKK comparison in April, but by August he was warning that mad Muslim mullahs who control Iran might try to trigger an Apocalypse on the 22nd of the month. They didn’t, thank God, but Lewis got me nervous and I listened to the news more closely that day than usual.

Lewis’s 1990 essay in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Roots of Muslim Rage” first opened America’s eyes about what motivates jihadists who have since become a threat to civilization itself. Jihadists blame the decline of a once-great Arab/Muslim civilization on western oppression. To regain power, they would impose a purified, 8th-century brand of Islam on themselves and everyone else. They would return to the beginnings if Islam and that’s what al Qaeda means: “The Source.” Then they would rise up again to smash the west and Christianity as they did fourteen hundred years ago.

How many Muslims are (take your pick) Jihadists? Islamofascists? Wahhabis? Radical Islamists? We don’t know, but it doesn’t take a majority in any given country or region to turn things completely around. Nazis were a minority in 1920s Germany but they took over in the 1930s. The Bolsheviks were a minority in 1917 Russia, but they controlled the Soviet Union a few years later.

After Pearl Harbor, Americans understood the threat and were ready to do whatever it took to destroy our enemies. Roosevelt demanded nothing short of unconditional surrender and we smashed the fascists in less than four years. Then we fought a cold war for more than forty years to defeat Communism. Do we still have what it takes to defeat the Jihadists? I’m not so sure. We have the strength, certainly, but lack the will. We’re afraid to offend them, much less destroy them. Two generations ago, we summoned the will and the courage to fight. Now it seems our national gonads are gone.

For decades, Muslim terrorists called for the destruction of America and we ignored them. Even after we suffered a worse attack than Pearl Harbor, we still don’t have the will to destroy our enemies. Many insist Islam is a religion of peace and our only enemy is Osama Bin Laden. However, Islam means “submission.” Will we submit? Iran will soon have nuclear weapons and its president threatens to wipe Israel off the map while his proxy army, Hezbollah, chants “Death to America.” Meanwhile, Americans are more worried about global warming than jihadists with nukes. Have we lost our minds along with our gonads?

Editors Decide

On the first day of school I outlined what students would be learning, how they would be graded, and explained that current events were an important part of the curriculum. We would be covering stories in three newspapers each day.

“Editors decide what the biggest story is and put it in the headline above the fold,” I said, holding up the Sun Journal headline about three bodies discovered in Newry, Maine. “Why do you suppose this is the headline?” I asked.

No responses. That was not unusual for the first day and there were only a few minutes left. “Reading on, I see that all three bodies were women and they were murdered. Newry is a small town just north of Bethel and very similar to your town. A triple murder is big news, don’t you think?”

Some students nodded, but the others just stared at me shyly. It was time to move on to their next class and I dismissed them saying, “We’ll see what’s in the headlines tomorrow.”

The story got a lot more attention the next day and I picked up five daily newspapers at Jockey Cap Store before school. I held up the Sun Journal again and there were bold, big-font headlines about a quadruple homicide above a large, color photograph of the man arrested. He was doing the perp walk from the Oxford County Jail to the Oxford County Courthouse. A deputy held him by the arm. I explained that he had confessed to the murders and that three victims were dismembered. After giving them a little time to react to that disturbing detail, I told them that I didn’t want to discuss the murders, but analyze different ways media covered them. “Why do you think the editor chose this picture?” I asked the class. “There would have been dozens of others to choose from.”

Again, no answers.

I held up the Portland Press Herald, which also displayed above-the-fold headlines and a large, color photo. “Why did the editors of this paper choose a different photo?” I asked.

They looked at it for a few seconds before a couple of hands went up. “Because he’s smiling,” said a boy.

“Why is he smiling?” a girl asked.

“Good question,” I said.

“Is he crazy?” asked another student.

“Of course he’s crazy,” said another. “He’d have to be to do what he did.”

“That’s creepy,” said the girl.

“Do you think that’s why the editors choose this picture?” I asked. “Did they want to creep out readers?”

“I guess so,” she said.

“Definitely,” said a boy.

“These two papers were side-by-side on the rack over at Jockey Cap Store,” I said. “Which one would people be more likely to buy?”

“The one that shows him smiling,” said the boy.

“Why?”

“Because it’s scary,” he said.

“Do people like to get scared?” I asked.

Several nodded. “Some do,” said a boy.

“Do editors think about that when they’re choosing what photos to run?”

“Probably,” said a girl.

I held up the Boston Globe. “This paper, which has ten times the circulation of the other two, ran the story on the front page but below the fold. Why did they decide it was less important than the two Maine papers?”

“Because Boston is far away?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But people down there are familiar with Newry and Bethel because they come up here on vacations. Most of the skiers at Sunday River are from Massachusetts, aren’t they? The Globe’s editors know this, so they put the story on the front page but below the fold.”

Next, I held up The Boston Herald. The entire front page was taken up with a different photo of the confessed killer. “Why did the Herald’s editors choose this picture?” I asked.

“Because the killer is looking right at the camera in that one,” said a boy.

“So when you look at the guy, he seems to be looking right back at you,” I added. Students stared the photo more closely. “Do you think I’m reading too much into this?” I asked. “Or do you think editors really consider this stuff when they’re deciding what to put on the front page?” I held up three papers for them to see side-by-side. Nobody responded.

“Since you’re not answering, I’ll just tell you that editors think a lot about what stories and photos go on the front page, and which ones don’t. People in media are making decisions all the time about how you see what you see. They also decide what you don’t see. Remember that.”

White Guilt

There it was again on the second day of pre-school teacher workshops. The principal passed out results of NCLB (No Child Left Behind) testing were segregated according to how “African Americans” and “Pacific Islanders” performed. My school didn’t request that data be broken down this way. It’s our federal government which is obsessed with race.

Some may object to my use of the word “segregate” in this case, but it fits. Once again, our federal government is discriminating on the basis of race - something it’s supposed to outlaw. Usually there are many more racial categories like Hispanic, Asian, Eskimo, Native American, and so on. If as a country we really believe there are no other differences between people with different skin tones, why do we keep this up? What if test results showed some races doing better or worse than others? Would government then require special programs for students of one race and not another? Is this what we should be doing? Is it racist?

Some would be appalled that I would even ask the question. “Of course it isn’t racist,” they think. “We’re only trying to help.” They support affirmative action programs and the like, to give minorities a “leg up” over members of the majority race - whites, in the case of the United States. They’re blind to the condescension inherent in such programs. They think they’re atoning for the sins of history for which they feel guilty, though they were born after slavery and discrimination were outlawed and virtually eliminated.

White guilt is a major force - not just here in the United States, but worldwide. In the 1860s and the 1960s it was a force for good. Slavery was abolished in the 1860s after the Civil War, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s finished the job a hundred years later. White guilt is still with us, but now it’s making us all sick - not just white people, but nonwhite people whom white saviors purport to help. Guilt-ridden whites cannot perceive the racial insult inherent in their firm belief that minorities could never make it on a level playing field without the boost of racial quotas.

Last week we were bombarded with reports like “Katrina - One Year After.” The should-have-been-former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin appeared on top-rated radio and television shows like “60 Minutes” and “Meet The Press” and continued to suggest that our federal government discriminated against the “chocolate” people of New Orleans (as Nagin calls them), by delaying emergency aid. If New Orleans had been majority white, Nagin keeps claiming, the federal response would have been quicker and fewer black people would have died. His claims are ridiculous of course, but the media continued to give them the most extensive coverage. White guilt. And Nagin continues to dodge questions about why he failed to evacuate his city after getting plenty of advance warning, even when shown pictures of the rows of drowned school busses he was supposed to use. If the voters of New Orleans reelected him after all that, they deserve him. That he’s still mayor is a strong argument that a lot of people in New Orleans are beyond help.

What else but white guilt is responsible for the decades-long obsession with bussing white and black students past their neighborhood schools and across town long after everyone concerned realized there is nothing to be gained by doing so? Though it has certainly increased racial tension, has achieving “racial balance” had any benefit at all? Evidence simply isn’t there.

“White Guilt” happens to be the title of a recent book by Shelby Steele. After many essays and articles on the subject, Steele makes a strong case that his fellow blacks become dysfunctional when they continually blame severe social and economic problems on white racism and not on their own behaviors. Trying to blame your problems on someone else is a common human tendency, but white guilt has enabled it to grow to the point where it’s the biggest obstacle to progress in the black community.

Steele’s book was not a surprise, coming sixteen years after “Content of Our Character,” in which he first questioned racial set-aside programs allegedly benefiting blacks. More surprising is the most recent book by Juan Williams entitled: “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It.” Williams echoes many of Steele’s themes. Remember, Williams co-authored “Eyes on the Prize” with Julian Bond and works for NPR.

Though he wasn’t the first prominent black man to question things, I guess it was Bill Cosby who really blew the lid off. Two years ago, he made a speech to Operation PUSH in Jesse Jackson’s back yard, saying: “It is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us, and it keeps a person frozen in their seat. It keeps you frozen in your hole that you are sitting in to point up and say, ‘That’s the reason why I am here.’ We need to stop this.”

We can all do our part to “stop this.” The next time you’re asked to put a checkmark in a box next to a racial category, draw your own box, print “HUMAN” next to it and put your checkmark there. If enough of us do that, maybe government will finally get the message.

Feeling Small

Used to be the lawn didn’t grow much in August, but this year is different. There’s so much water in the ground that it still needs mowing every week. The field below it has to be mowed once a year and that requires an industrial-strength mower called a bush hog. Last week, I rented one that you sometimes see advertised on TV. It’s a walk-behind unit, not the kind that is attached to the back of a farm tractor. It’s self-propelled, sort of, but it doesn’t have a steering wheel. Turning the thing around at the end of a pass again and again requires more strength and endurance than is left in my 55-year-old body. It’s a two-acre field on the side of Christian Hill and it’s too steep to go side to side, so I had to walk up and down a hundred times behind the machine and hold on to it as it climbed over and chopped up various plants which had grown as tall as I am. Even with numerous breaks to catch my breath, it took a month off the end of my life to finish.

It’s the field’s second incarnation. A farmer named McDaniels created it a century and a half ago. He cleared it and rolled stones down the hill into a wall. Some were too big, so he drilled and split them into smaller, irregularly-shaped pieces that he maneuvered into place on the wall. He must have run out of energy too because he left two big rocks only partially split. Then he planted apple trees. I don’t know how long he worked the apple orchard but eventually he or someone else abandoned it to the forest. By the time I purchased the property it was all woods again. Among the oaks, ashes maples, and birches a few skeletons of long-dead apple trees remained between the stone walls. It took me about a decade to clear it again, cutting trees and burning brush. Many times I sat on one of the walls McDaniels made and wiped sweat from my face as I looked over my work. I imagined that he must have sat there and done the same generations ago. Eventually I hired someone to stump it with an excavator and replant it into a field.

As it would have for McDaniels, the field provides me a marvelous view to the west and I never tire of watching sunsets over Kearsarge in the spring and Baldface in the summer. On clear days, I can see smoke from the cog railway on Mount Washington. Having trekked up and down those mountains I know how massive they are, but when I’m over there and looking back east toward my property on Christian Hill, I can barely make out the hill, much less my field or my house. It helps me realize that my years of hard work are nearly invisible in the grand scheme of things. The hills and mountains are hundreds of millions of years old and my time on them is not much more than the brief, dim glow from a firefly’s butt. Humility is a good thing and I have much to be humble about. If I should forget, someone or something will usually remind me. It might be my wife. It might be a letter to the editor.

All that remained of McDaniels’ work were a few stone walls hidden by woods. I cleared the trees just as he did and constructed a few smaller walls with the help of a friend. Hopefully, they’ll last as long as his. McDaniels also carved his initials on a granite boundary marker nearby. On the other side of Christian Hill, there may someday be a stone with my name engraved in the Number Four Cemetery and somebody else will probably mow around it, for a while anyway.

Though I can see a long way toward large mountains in New Hampshire, I remind myself that what appears a panorama to me is but a tiny sliver of earth’s surface and earth is a tiny speck in the universe. When George Bailey had similarly insignificant feelings about his place and time here in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” an angel visited to convince him otherwise. I haven’t seen any angels lately and I’m mostly glad I have so little influence on events around me. If it were otherwise, I’d have to take more responsibility for what happens on this planet.

Matthew’s gospel says God knows when a sparrow falls. I’m also aware that He created the hawk and house cat which can hasten the sparrow’s demise. The passage goes on to say that God counts the hairs on my head. It’s also true that He’s making His job easier lately by expanding my bald spot.

Then there’s my philosopher friend, Kevin, who tells me: “Always remember Tom, that you’re unique - just like everyone else.”

Confused and Divided

This is a confusing war. Few of us are sure who or what we’re fighting. Are we at war with terror? Terror is a thing - an extreme fear - and that’s what our leaders say we’re fighting. I suppose we humans are always fighting fear of one kind or another, but an organized war against a thing? Our Constitution says Congress has sole power to declare war and the president sole power to carry it out as commander-in-chief. Did Congress declare war on a thing?

Maybe some Americans believe we’re fighting a thing but I doubt it. If they think about it, they must consider who is using terror against us. We’re divided according to how we answer three essential questions: Who are the terrorists? Why are they attacking us? How should we respond?

First, who is attacking us? Some say it’s al Qaida because they’re the only ones who attacked us on September 11th. Others say it’s not just them but other Arab Muslim terrorist organizations as well such as Hezbollah, who have killed hundreds of Americans and were most recently at war with Israel. Still others say it’s not just Arab Muslim terrorists, but all Muslim terrorists including Iranians (who are not Arab but Persian), Indonesians, Filipinos, Pakistanis and several other kinds of Muslims as well. The only commonality is that they’re all Muslims, which means that they’re all followers of Islam. These Americans believe we’re fighting a newly-resurgent form of Radical Islam followed by many Muslims from all ethnic groups. Not all Muslims are terrorists, they say, but all terrorists are Muslims.

Secondly, why are they attacking us? Some Americans think it’s because we deserve it. Former University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill commented on September 11th, saying: “Why did it take Arabs to do what we here should have done a long time ago?” He called September 11th victims “little Eichmans,” as if were they who want to kill Jews and not the Muslims who attacked us - who compare Jews to dogs and pigs. Other professors said similarly outrageous things and were defended by still other professors who claimed they were not traitors, but only exercising academic freedom.

Other Americans think we didn’t deserve September 11th, but think we oppress Muslims, steal their oil, support Israel, and all this angers them enough to attack us. They think America is controlled by big corporations who steal natural resources from third-world nations everywhere and the world hates us for it.

Other Americans were shocked by the 9-11 attack and have been trying since to figure out why Muslims hate us, but they aren’t sure yet.

Still others think Radical Muslims hate us and want to kill us because we’re not Muslims, because we don’t want to convert to Islam, and because we’re their biggest obstacle to taking over the world and making it Muslim. After the conquest, they think, ruling caliphs would impose Islamic law called Sharia, make men grow beards, make women wear burkhas, then kill fornicators and homosexuals. They think we’re evil, the Great Satan.

Finally, how should we respond? Those who think we deserved to be attacked suggest that we cooperate in our own demise. They’d like to see America as we know it collapse. Others who think we didn’t deserve such a harsh attack believe a measured response is warranted, and we should have limited our counterattack to Afghanistan. They see the Iraq war as going too far and making Muslims even more angry at us. They think we should put it all behind us now, pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and move on.

Others of us think we’re not going far enough - that our limited war and measured responses give our enemies the impression that we’re not willing to do whatever it takes to win - that this strategy encourages our enemies who will hold out against us for now, then step up their attacks as our resolve weakens. These Americans think we should go all out - destroy Radical Islam by hunting down and killing terrorists while taking out the governments of any countries that supports terrorists, such as Syria and Iraq. They believe in the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes even though Bush himself seems to have abandoned it. Many have relatives on the front lines and display yellow ribbons on their vehicles.

Fewer than half of eligible Americans will actually vote in ten weeks. Meanwhile, senators and congressmen travel around their districts appealing to as many groups as possible. As Senator Lieberman discovered, this war, however we understand it, is issue number one. Most of us will still be confused about it after the election - unless we’re attacked again. That would focus our minds.

News Control is Mind Control

There are parallels between the Vietnam War and our war with Islamofascists today, but not the ones our mainstream media look for. The first is media’s willingness to be manipulated by our enemies. The other is the fallacy of fighting a limited, prolonged conflict. When we don’t go all out, we’re at the mercy of the pampered, blame-America-first types who dominated our press corps then, as now, and who report only quagmire from their hotel rooms.

Teaching Vietnam as part of my 20th century US History course, I use PBS’s “Vietnam: A Television History,” a ten-hour series produced by Stanley Karnow in 1983. Karnow interviewed Viet Cong veterans after the war who boasted about setting mines and booby traps around villages, about shooting at US soldiers from civilian homes, then escaping through tunnels into surrounding jungle. They considered themselves heroes for hiding behind civilians and then sneaking away to let villagers suffer the retaliation they deserved. Karnow played television footage of burning villages and peasant wailing, the footage Americans back home watched almost every night on the evening news.

Reports from the Middle East today are similar. Al Qaida terrorists use Iraqi and Afghan homes and villages as bases to attack American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, then hide out in populated areas. American viewers see wrecked homes and women and children crying. Hezbollah terrorists shoot rockets into Israel from civilian homes in Lebanon, then let civilians suffer retaliation. Our media films the suffering while ignoring the cowardly tactics causing it. Reuters uses doctored photographs exaggerating civilian damage and deaths until US bloggers expose them. Vietnam is a blueprint for media coverage in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Lebanon: Exaggerate whatever suggests quagmire and ignore what may indicate progress.

After an all-out attack on American bases during the Tet “truce” in 1968, the Viet Cong and NVA were soundly defeated. Their defeat, however, was portrayed as a victory by our media. An account in Wikipedia describes it well: “Following [CBS anchor Walter] Cronkite’s editorial report during the Tet Offensive that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, ‘If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.’ Soon after Cronkite’s report, Johnson dropped out of the 1968 presidential race.”

When Vietnamese village leaders resisted communism, the Viet Cong tied them up and cut off their heads in front of villagers. Radical Islamic terrorists kidnap Americans and Iraqis who cooperate with the US-backed government and behead them on videotape for internet broadcast. American reporter Daniel Pearl got his head cut off because he was Jewish and wrote for the conservative Wall Street Journal.

Mainstream media is unscathed so far. CNN voluntarily censored its broadcasts from Iraq under Saddam so they could remain in Baghdad. Walter Cronkite’s CBS successor Dan Rather fawningly interviewed Saddam Hussein. CBS’s allegedly tough journalist Mike Wallace obsequiously interviewed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Earlier this week, however, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped a reporter and a cameraman for conservative Fox News. Will they be decapitated too?

How many times have American TV cameras filmed Muslims burning American flags and stomping on them? Dozens? Hundreds? Are they staged for the cameras? Why are the signs in English? The role media played in Vietnam is well understood by Radical Muslim terrorists today. They know their enemy but we don’t know ours. They play our media like a fiddle.

News control is mind control. It’s power. Whoever wields it decides what people see or don’t see, what they hear or don’t hear - what they think. In a democracy, people vote accordingly. Perception is reality and media controls perception in war. Limited, protracted wars like those in Vietnam and the Middle East are most vulnerable to media influence. If we’re going to fight, go all out or don’t go at all.

Former students who became soldiers are appalled by mainstream media coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan. “All they show are the negatives. They ignore good things we do,” is a typical comment. By “mainstream media,” I mean the big-city broadsheets like the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. I also mean the “Alphabet Networks” like ABC, CBS and NBC as well as newsmagazines such as Time and Newsweek. Although their power is diminishing with competition from talk radio, weblogs and cable news like Fox, the mainstream media still have control over what most Americans know.

MSM journalists believe they were responsible for US forces leaving Vietnam and they’re right. However, they don’t believe they’re responsible for the consequences - millions of Vietnamese boat people and millions of dead Cambodians in the killing fields. If history is any guide, MSM coverage of today’s war may result in the premature pullout of American forces from the Middle East just as it did in Vietnam. Consequences for that will be more September 11s - or worse. The Viet Cong didn’t follow us home. Islamofascists will. They’re already here.

Backcountry History

People don’t like to see ATVs coming. The very first time I climbed onto one - my brother’s - an angry land owner waved me down before I’d gone a mile. His wife and daughter came out too and explained how 4-wheelers had raced by his house and trespassed on his property. After he recognized me as the guy in the newspaper who likes to explore old roads, cellar holes and cemeteries, he let me through, but I learned that ATV riders before me had given the machines a bad reputation.

Last spring I bought my own 4-wheeler and I’ve explored much more country than I ever could on foot or in my truck. I’m discovering a lot of old roads, cemeteries, neighborhoods, mines and gravel pits. This probably doesn’t sound like fun for most people, but I’m a history geek and this is how I get my jollies when I’m not teaching.

Before venturing into an area, I study maps, starting with the most recent - usually the DeLorme Street Atlas. From that, I go to USGS (United States Geological Survey) maps, which are the most detailed. These can be purchased from the State of Maine for $5 per quadrangle. Some are updated within the past ten years and others - like the one for my own town of Lovell - go back to 1962. They depict topographic features like elevation, swamps, ponds and lakes, but also fields, woods, orchards, and even buildings. The University of New Hampshire has historic USGS maps available online from the early 20th century for all of New England and New York state. Most towns are depicted in the 1940s and some in the first decade of the 20th century. From Saco Valley Printing in Fryeburg, I’ve purchased mid-19th century maps of every town in Maine and New Hampshire arranged by county. Most recently, I purchased maps of the towns within a 30-mile radius from the Oxford County Atlas of 1880. All these early maps show family surnames of people who lived in every area of town, as well as churches, schoolhouses, saw mills, grist mills, fulling mills, stave mills and cemeteries. From these, I can determine what areas of a given town were once settled and are now abandoned. Studying a succession of USGS maps I can determine when the old settlements were reforested after the descendants of early settlers stopped farming them and moved westward after the Civil War.

Most of the old roads still exist as rugged trails and, if they’re not closed off by the present owners, I can explore them. Some have wires across and others are barred by elaborate gates. Many will have “keep out” signs specifically aimed at 4-wheelers. They let in snowmobilers, but not ATVs and I guess that’s because so many inconsiderate riders have dug up the ground by spinning tires or other reckless behavior. I’ll see a lot of this in gravel pits which interest me because I like to examine layers of sand, clay, gravel and stones deposited by glaciers from 10,000 to 1.5 million years ago. During that time span glaciers came and went at least four times. Maps of glacial activity are available from The Maine Geological Survey in Augusta and I’ve purchased several (called “Surficial Geology” maps) for only $5 apiece. Conveniently, they correspond to USGS quadrangle maps. More detailed geological descriptions are available on each quadrangle for an additional $5. Going back even further in history is a bedrock geology map of the whole state depicting what kinds of rocks and fault lines underlie the glacial sediment we all walk on. Bedrock is exposed in several places like cliff faces, hill tops, mines and road cuts. When I pull over and study these, I’m looking hundreds of millions of years into the past when Maine was attached to northwest Africa - long before there were any humans on earth.

Last weekend, I spent an entire day exploring in Greenwood, Maine. The western half of the town is bisected north to south by an abandoned road that is open to ATVs. There are numerous mines to see as well as settlements. Few parts of west Greenwood ever had electricity and there are very few buildings left standing - mostly hunting camps and a scattering of original homes now used seasonally. I found cemeteries miles from any paved roads and containing veterans of the Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. These guys cut roads into steep hillsides, built homes and barns with elaborate foundations, cleared land, and died. Their descendants buried them and then moved on to do similar things in America’s west.

Lately I’m realizing that even with my new 4-wheeler, I won’t likely have time to explore all the abandoned places in just my part of Maine before I’m buried under one of those stones myself, but it won’t be for lack of trying.

It's Our War Too

On a tour of Israel in May of 2000, my wife called me from the northern city of Tiberias. Minutes before, I watched reports on the “Newshour” of Hezbollah rocket attacks and I asked her if she’d seen anything. “No,” she said, “but I can hear explosions in the distance.” We have reservations for another trip in October but it’s been postponed to May - too many rockets hitting along the itinerary.

Cowardly Hezbollah terrorists hide rocket launchers among civilians. They don’t wear uniforms and blend into the civilian population as Israel counterattacks. When Israel was attacked openly, it finished off invading armies in short order. In 1967 it took six days. Muslim Arab countries staged four open attacks on Israel - 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Each time, their forces were annihilated by tiny Israel. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Yemen - various combinations of which attacked in each of the four wars - were humiliated. After the fourth consecutive rout they learned Israel would not be defeated in open combat, so they resorted to terrorism and economic blackmail.

Following the 1973 war, the Arab oil embargo caused major damage to our economy. People my age remember gas lines, inflation, and skyrocketing interest rates. Then terrorism increased. Even before Israel became a country in 1948, Jews endured decades of vile attacks on civilian settlements in Palestine. Between the wars, Israel was continuously hit by artillery and rockets from Syria, Lebanon and Egypt and they continued after 1973. During Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles into Israel and financed Palestinian suicide attacks for years after, sending $25,000 to the family of each jihadist suicide bomber.

Hatred of Israel is a unifying force for Muslims. Shiites and Sunnis who have been killing each other for centuries will work together to attack Jews. With the rise of Radical Islam they work together to kill Americans as well.

Radical Islam comes in two basic forms:

The Shiite version dates from the return of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1970s and continues in Iran under the mullahs. To them, we are “The Great Satan.” With their petrodollars, Shiite Iran created Hezbollah in Lebanon and in other countries around the world. They’ve murdered hundreds of Americans as well as Israelis.

The Sunni version takes the form of Wahhabism which originated in Arabia in the mid-1700s and got stronger by its association with the House of Saud and the oil revenues of Saudi Arabia. The Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda are incarnations of Radical Sunni Islam. Shiite and Sunni radicals cooperate in attacks on Israel and the United States, as well as India, Britain, Spain, Indonesia, etc.

Though some of us knew it already, all Americans learned they were targets of Radical Islam on September 11th. Since then, however, the Democrat Party and their mainstream media mouthpieces have persuaded many that only al Qaeda is our enemy - not Hezbollah, not Saddam Hussein, not Iran, not Syria. They couldn’t be more wrong. A parade in Tehran, Iran September 22, 2003 displayed missiles draped with banners proclaiming: “Israel should be wiped off the map” and “We will trample America under our feet,” “Death to America,” and “Death to Israel.”

At a rally last year, Sheik Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah in Lebanon, shouted, “Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: ‘Death to America!’” Tens of thousands of his followers shouted, “Death to America! Death to America! Death to America! Death to America!”

Osama Bin Laden’s second-in-command appeared on al Jazeera last Saturday. Ayman al-Zawahiri said al Qaeda will not stand idle while Israelis “burn the Muslim brothers in Gaza and in Lebanon.” With a poster of the burning World Trade Center behind him, he continued saying “All the world is a battlefield open in front of us.”

Last week, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow was asked if President Bush believes current fighting between Israel and Lebanon “is as much the United States’ war as it is Israel’s war.”

“No,” he said and my heart sank.

President Bush is going wobbly on us. Immediately following September 11th, he said the United States would go after terrorists and the countries supporting them. Now, Iran and Syria are calling his bluff and he’s folding. Instead of pressing for a cease fire he should let Israel destroy Hezbollah, then give them bunker busters to drop on Assad’s palace in Damascus. If Iran responds openly to that as they threaten to, bring it on. Get it out in the open again.

As the reporter suggested in his question to Snow, it’s as much our war as it is Israel’s. Our only choices are: 1. We fight it over there or over here. 2. We fight a non-nuclear Iran now or a nuclear Iran later.

We can postpone our trip again if necessary, but if I were a young man with a determined commander-in-chief, I’d go there in a uniform with a weapon.

Sick Water

It was a beautiful lake if you looked at it from a distance. There were fields sloping down to the water’s edge on the far shore and rolling hills visible beyond. Several nicely-built homes dotted other stretches of waterfront but the lake was dying.

This wasn’t what I expected to find. Exploring back roads on the other side of Lewiston last week, I’d picked up a sandwich and pulled over to a sandy beach on Sabattus Pond next to Route 126. It was a humid ninety degrees and one would expect the beach to be packed with cars, children and mothers on beach chairs; but it wasn’t. Mine was the only car and the only life in evidence was a couple of crows hopping along past the occasional soda can or discarded food wrapper. Further down was a boarded-up old bath house. This was mid-July, the height of Maine’s summer, and the beach looked like a moonscape. I got out, walked to the water’s edge, and looked down. The lake was almost opaque in a yellowish green haze, a kind of thinned-out pea soup. Depressing.

Sabattus Pond is a misnomer. It’s big enough to be a lake and that makes its impending death more tragic. I had questions - like when did the lake get sick, for instance, so I checked out my Maine Atlas and Gazetteer and found a boat landing along the western shore. Two guys were backing up a trailer to a floating bass boat and I asked one how long the water had been like this. He’d only been around about six years, he said, and the algae blooms occurred every year. He’d heard there was a chicken farm on a river flowing into the lake that had fouled it. “Killed it,” was more accurate I thought. Looking at the atlas again, I noticed one of the in-flowing rivers was aptly named - the Dead River. “The bass fishing is good,” he said, “but I wouldn’t dare eat any of them.”

Further along the Sawyer Road next to the eastern edge of Sabattus Pond, there were smaller roads leading to the shore. Exploring these, I noticed cottages with water frontage in fairly good repair, but on the inland side of the roads many were not maintained. Quite a few displayed overgrown lawns, rusty old “For Sale” signs, and generalized disrepair. Some appeared outright abandoned. It was depressing.

As I crossed the town line from Sabattus into Greene, the road moved away from the shore and properties were typical of rural Maine - some were kept up and others neglected. At the top of a hill was a beautiful farm with meticulously managed grounds. Next to it was a handsome stone building called the Sawyer Memorial, but its parking lot hadn’t been used for a while and I wondered why. There was grass growing up through cracks in the pavement. On the other side of the road I was surprised to see dozens of big old post-WWII army trucks parked in rows. I wondered what were they doing on a horse farm. A mile further on was a huge, fenced-in area containing several hundred old trucks painted in green camouflage. Researching online later, I learned they were M813, 5-ton, army vehicles manufactured in the 1980s. This compound looked deserted also. Tall grass growing up around them indicated the trucks hadn’t moved in a while. In my gloomy mood, the endless rows of metal and rubber seemed a huge waste.

Further along, I came to an old cemetery in the town of Wales. Gravestones dating back to the early 1800s had been pushed over and several were broken. Obelisks were toppled and though the grass had been mowed, no one had seen fit to repair the damage. The scene depressed me even further. Veterans of every conflict since the Civil War were buried there and I wondered who would wish to dishonor the graves of patriots. Was it an antiwar protest? Mindless vandalism by purposeless young men with nothing else to do? I couldn’t tell. Neither could I decide which would be worse.

A bit further on, the lake was back in view and I looked down across rolling hay fields to the sparkling water. Had I not stood on its shore, I wouldn’t have known it was dying. It was still beautiful from high up, reflecting the sun back to me, but its condition was critical. My circumnavigation showed not a single person swimming in it. Could the lake be flushed out and brought back to life? If so, what would it take? I thought of Kezar Lake in my own town. Its waters are still pure and I realized how important it is to keep them that way.

Sabattus Pond is dying. I strongly suspect, after my two-hour tour around it, that the economic and social health of the three communities on its shores is also suffering as a direct result.

The Eyes Have It

“I care more and more about less and less,” said the old man.

He’d just recovered from two brushes with death, each requiring major surgery and I had asked him how he was feeling. That was his answer. He looked me in the eye and waited for me to respond. For several seconds I thought about it and then asked him what he meant. “The number of things that concern me has narrowed as I get older,” he explained, “but I care more about those things than I used to.”

I understood that. He’d chosen his words carefully. He continued to look at me and I could see in his eyes that he was okay. He’d accepted that he would die sooner or later and probably sooner, but he didn’t seem anxious about it. He was a religious man and he’d had many heartaches in his long life. He was no stranger to suffering - physical, emotional and spiritual. We were friends because he let me know him and I wondered if our friendship was one of the things he still cared about. I didn’t ask, but I believe it was. We had discussed much about what troubled us and what made us happy, but words were not the only way we communicated. Silent eye contact said a great deal. He didn’t look away when we talked or when we paused and I could see no guile in his eyes. There’s wisdom in that old Yiddish proverb: “The eyes are the mirrors of the soul,” and also in the quote from Emerson: “The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.” The old man had lived through a long life with many hills and valleys and swamps. He didn’t look forward to dying, but there was no fear in his eyes.

When I was a young man, death was part of my job. My college classes were all in the morning and I worked a 3-11 shift every night at a geriatric hospital where people didn’t get better and go home. They went there to die and if they had their marbles, they knew it. As an orderly, I fed them, cleaned them up when they soiled themselves, put them to bed at night, and brought them down to the morgue when they died. During my two-and-a-half years there, many dozens died on my shift. I cleaned their bodies, tied on their toe tags, wrapped them in their shrouds, lifted them onto the stretcher and brought them down to the “cooler” from which the undertakers would pick them up. Most didn’t go gracefully, but some did and I’ll always remember those. Often I could tell how they would deal with their deaths by looking in their eyes.

Some people I’ve been acquainted with for years don’t let me know them. They guard their eyes in various ways, and they have a repertoire of personas they put on and take off like a set of clothes, only more quickly. Whatever is real under all that I never see. Maybe I wouldn’t want to if I could. G. K. Chesterton said, “There’s a road from eye to heart that does not go through the intellect,” but for these people, that road is blocked. Some block it on purpose; some aren’t even aware.

Other people let me know them. After we get friendly, a few will confide that I made them nervous by the way I looked at them when we first met. They were intimidated. That surprised me at first; then it started to bother me because I didn’t intend to make them uncomfortable. Lately though, I’m coming to accept it. I’m just not very good at small talk and I don’t often engage in it. If there’s nothing to say, I prefer to look and listen silently to people, and that makes some of them nervous. Sometimes my mind will wander while I’m trying to listen. That’s rude, I know, but I can’t help it. If I think of it, I’ll smile more when I’m looking at someone to try and soften whatever their impression might be, but only if it’s a real smile. I don’t want to fake it. Life is too short for pretense.

Familiarity with death isn’t morbid. Awareness of death can enrich life. One of life’s few certainties is that we all die. It’s just a matter of how and when. Though I can’t say for sure, I believe there are worse things than death and a meaningless life is probably one of them. We humans need to believe in something greater than ourselves. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. put it: “If a man has nothing he would die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

Music, Politics and Culture

There were few if any country music stations where I grew up in suburban Boston. Nobody I knew wore cowboy hats. My musical tastes were heavily influenced by my peer group. It was rock and roll, folk music and protest songs we listened to in the car and at dances. Later, at college, it was more of the same.

My first exposure to country music was after my best friend Philip quit high school, joined the army, and went to Vietnam. When he returned, he had developed a taste for Johnny Cash and other country singers. He was almost embarrassed to tell me because it wasn’t considered cool to like that kind of music. I wasn’t confident enough to withstand criticism of my peer group in those days, so I resisted listening to country music if anyone else was around, but I kind of liked Johnny Cash too.

My college friends believed it really was possible to put an end to war for all time and their musical tastes reflected that. The lyrics condemned war and capitalism while extolling pacifism and socialism. Country music seemed its polar opposite, producing songs with lyrics like: “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee. We don’t take our trips on LSD.” Singer/songwriter Merle Haggard actually did smoke marijuana - maybe not in Muskogee, but certainly in several other venues. He said he wrote the song to describe how his long-dead father would have looked at the 1960s.

Country music celebrated patriotism, family, God, and other traditional American values. Aficionados understood that the necessity for a strong military defense was constant. The idea that there was anything shameful in our military heritage was completely foreign to them. Just as it would always be necessary to defend oneself against bullies on the playground, it would always be necessary to defend our country from threat of invasion or takeover. Such was the human condition. Views like that were horrifying to people at the colleges I went to.

The boy meets girl theme was also common in country music but it was always monogamous. As Haggard sang: “We don’t make a party out of lovin’.” It wasn’t Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” No. Country music fans saw that as cheating. If someone strayed, country singers wailed sadly over the heartbreak that always came with it.

A condescending view toward country music prevailed where I grew up and it’s still with us here in much of the northeast where people like to listen to NPR. they think country music fans are dumb rednecks. NPR listeners are intelligent and sophisticated. There’s a definite red-state/blue-state correlation also. David J. Firestein, career State Department diplomat (working on his own), analyzed the distribution of country music radio stations in areas that voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004. He concluded: “[I]f you were to overlay a map of the current country music fan base onto the iconic red-and-blue map of the United States, you would find that its contours coincide virtually identically with those of the red state region, probably right down to the county level.”

Would you want to bet that the NPR fan base would coincide pretty closely with the blue-state map? I would.

In his “Nashville Skyline” column, Chet Flippo describes country music fans thusly: “So Red pretty much means conservatives, upholders of traditional values, NRA members and beer drinkers. Blue is shorthand for liberals, tree-huggers, NPR listeners and wine sippers.” Flippo categorized James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen as country singers who appeal to blue state fans and Charlie Daniels and Toby Keith as country singers appealing to red state fans. Further distinctions between the two he describes this way: “It’s not geographic so much as it is mental. If it wears a cowboy hat, it’s Red. If it wears a beret, it’s Blue. Beer is Red. Merlot is so Blue. If your SUV is a Mercedes, BMW, Range Rover or Hummer, you’re Blue. If it’s a Jimmy or a Jeep, you’re Red. If your pickup truck is a Cadillac, you’re Blue. If it’s a Ford F-150, you’re Red. It’s snowmobiles vs. skis, power boats vs. sailboats; USA Today vs. the New York Times; Dunkin’ Donuts vs. Starbucks. Is your lawn mower a riding John Deere or a walking illegal alien? The first is obviously Red; the second, Blue.”

My pickup truck is a Toyota T-100 and I’m a wine sipper. The radio buttons in my car and my truck are set on talk radio stations, an oldies station, the local Conway, NH station which plays a nice mix of stuff, and NPR. One button in each vehicle is also set on a country music station. When NPR gets too smug, it’s a welcome antidote.

Distress Signals

We’re in trouble. As evidence, I saved four related articles with a common thread. Three are from lifesitenews.com - a Canadian Catholic newsletter, and one from the Boston Herald.

The first is about Spain. Last winter, the new Socialist government banned use of the terms “mother” and “father” on birth certificates. The father was to be listed as “Parent (progenitor) A” and mother as “Parent (progenitor) B.” Lesbian groups objected immediately, complaining that “progenitor” is a masculine term. They wanted “progenitora” which is feminine.

The second is from Ontario, Canada. The provincial government there is banning use of the terms “man,” “woman,” “wife,” “husband,” “widow” and “widower” from all Ontario law. The changes are an outgrowth of legalizing homosexual “marriage.”

The third is from Prince Edward Island, which is also banning traditional terms referring to members of families the way Ontario did. In PEI, there will be no more references to “bride” or “groom” on legal documents either, only the generic “spouse.”

The fourth is from The Boston Herald which reported last month that: “A Quincy [Massachusetts] mother says she was humiliated when an employee of the [Victoria’s Secret] lingerie franchise’s Faneuil Hall store flatly refused to allow her to breast-feed her daughter, directing her to a public restroom outside.”

All four articles represent disturbing, deconstructionist efforts to separate western perceptions of heterosexuality from reproduction, and from marriage and family. The story of a breast-feeding woman being shooed from Victoria’s Secret is telling, and not an isolated incident according to the Herald: “Last year, a woman was told she couldn’t breast-feed her baby in a Victoria’s Secret in South Carolina” and “[last month], sales associates at a Wisconsin Victoria’s Secret told a mother her exposed breast might offend some customers.” Can you believe this? Exposed breasts considered offensive by Victoria’s Secret?

Victoria’s Secret profits from the sensual display of women’s anatomy, especially breasts. While some may think such display immoral, I’m not necessarily one of them. As a lifelong heterosexual male, I’ve always appreciated women’s breasts. Even as an aging one whose other faculties are in decline, that appreciation doesn’t seem to diminish. Attracting male attention is one of the functions of the female breast and not an unhealthy one. Victoria’s Secret’s lingerie business is based on this fundamental human fact. However, to suggest that the other function of the breast - the nurturing function - could be offensive, is a dangerous bellwether for our time.

First Amendment cases adjudicated over several decades claim the display of women’s breasts can be protected speech, but according to the Herald article: “Massachusetts is one of the few states that doesn’t have laws to protect breast-feeding women. Women who breast-feed in public in Massachusetts can be charged with indecent exposure or lewd and lascivious conduct. A bill that would prevent people from booting breast-feeding mothers from public places and police from charging them has been stalled at the State House.” Yet, ultra-liberal Massachusetts is the only state to have legalized homosexual “marriage.” Maddening.

The US Supreme Court in “Lawrence vs Texas” somehow found a Constitutional right to sodomy. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court somehow found a state constitutional right for homosexuals to “marry.” The Socialist government of Spain and the Liberal Party government of Canada established similar rights. The reader has figured out by now that I consider these developments preposterous. They’re part of a concerted effort by the left to dissociate sexuality from reproduction, and to uncouple heterosexuality from its natural role in reproduction, marriage and family. Such intrinsic connections are “offensive,” they claim, and “heterosexist.” Homosexual activists lead the charge, relentlessly pressuring governments across the western world to cave in to their petulant demands.

What about the rest of us? What if we’re offended when we can’t be referred to as husbands and wives on marriage documents or as mothers and fathers on birth certificates? Why do we give in so timidly to bizarre demands from radical sexual minorities? What’s next? Abolishing Fathers’ Day and Mothers’ Day? Will we instead be forced to celebrate “Progenitors’ Day”?

I shouldn’t have to spell this out, but listen up: Forget what they told you in college. Men and women are different and they’re supposed to be. Most men are aggressive. Most women are nurturing. Women attract men, get them to commit, and tame them. We call this marriage. Sex is a tool for this - heterosexual only. Homosexuality has no place here. When men see women use their breasts to nurse their children, it taps instincts in them to stick around, be fathers to their children - especially their sons - and to use their aggressiveness for the protection of their families and communities. This is an important part of our cultural glue. To the extent that we follow this plan, our culture is strengthened. To the extent we deviate from it, our culture is weakened. The last four decades are testament to this.

I’ve been watching with alarm as the left eats away at that glue and puts us all in trouble. I’ve had enough. Have you?