More of Maine's Abandoned Neighborhoods

I. Saunders cellar hole

Soft, white-and-yellow flowers poked up through last fall’s leaves and contrasted with hard, gray granite. Whoever lived there had been very good with stone, and with flowers. The people who positioned each were long dead. Their house had fallen in and rotted away, but I knew I would have liked them if only for where and how they chose to live. The cellar hole still perched beside the steep dirt road. Holes don’t usually perch but this one did. Through deep woods, I pulled my ATV into what would have been their dooryard on the uphill side. From there, I could oversee what would have been the view from the house when it stood. Hardwoods across the road were bare of leaves and a mountainous horizon was visible to the west. The view would have been unobstructed when the farm operated back in the nineteenth century and sunsets must have been stunning. That was my second indication of how much intelligence and planning went into laying out that farmstead. Getting off my machine, I was careful not to step on more beds of flowers the like of which I’d never seen before. Next, I noticed a dug well covered with an old piece of galvanized steel roofing. Then I walked down to the cellar hole for a closer look. It was impressive. Massive chimney bases told me the house had probably been a cape with large fireplaces on the gable ends. From one uphill corner a galvanized, steel pipe stuck out - a gravity feed from the uphill well still trickled after all these years.

When I got home I pulled out my maps. One old Oxford County map told me that someone named “I. Saunders” lived there in 1858. Another showed him still there in 1880.

It was spring vacation and I’d finally found time to renew one of my favorite pastimes - exploring abandoned neighborhoods. I had focused on Albany Township, Maine. It’s not a municipality anymore, but it was once. Judging from the 1858 map, it had almost as many people as Lovell did, but seems to have lost many more in the post-Civil War outmigration to the west - so many that it ceased being a town and gave over control to the State of Maine. I’d looked it over from my pickup truck over the past ten years when I felt like driving around on Friday-night dates with my wife, and noticed some building going on. Some of the old neighborhoods are being repopulated. I saw homes going up next to or behind two-hundred-year-old cellar holes. People today obviously agree with 19th century pioneers about the best places to site a house.
1858 Map

Nobody built near the Saunders cellar hole though - too steep for them I’d guess. There are ledges on the hillside above and it looks like Mr. I. Saunders pulled some large flat stone down for his house foundation. He used two massive 5X5-foot slabs to form one corner and a few others to form parts of the cellar walls. Don’t know exactly how long they’ve been in place, but they haven’t moved after at least a century-and-a-half of freezing and thawing. As I said, he was good with stone. He might have been assisted by relatives as the 1858 map shows other Saunders farmsteads above and below his. Brothers perhaps? The Saunders farm above had disappeared on the 1880 map. Did that brother seek his fortune in America’s west as so many others from western Maine did?1880 Map

Looking at a 1915 USGS map to be found online on a University of New Hampshire web site, I could see there was still a house there where I. Saunders had built it and quite a few acres were still clear on both sides of the steep dirt road.1915 USGS map

On the 1943 map, some of the land was still clear but the house was gone. The 1963 map shows the forest having overtaken everything.1941 USGS map

As of last week, a few trees left from his apple orchard stood here and there between stone walls, and those delicate, white-and-yellow flowers were still blooming.

Obama's Nuclear Policy

“President Obama has announced a new policy on America’s use of nuclear weapons,” I told the class. “He won’t be the first to use them in a conflict with another nation, he said. And, he won’t retaliate with nuclear weapons if we’re attacked by a country which is using other WMD, or ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ such as chemical or biological weapons against us.”

I waited for that to sink in.

After a pause, a boy raised his hand and asked, “What would be the point of that?”

“Yeah,” said another boy. “Why have them if we’re not going to use them?”

“President Obama says America won’t retaliate with nuclear weapons against a country that has signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty - countries that have pledged not to make nuclear weapons. I think he’s trying to encourage more countries to sign it and that’s a big reason for his new policy,” I suggested.

“Who agrees with Obama’s new policy?” I asked.

A couple of girls didn’t stick their hands up, but turned their palms around to me while their elbows stayed on the desk. They smiled meekly.

“Who disagrees?”

Most of the students raised their hands. We had been studying WMD and the arms race following World War II. Students had seen “Hiroshima,” a made-for-TV docudrama focusing on President Truman’s decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s decision to surrender. They learned what a nuclear weapon can do - how it kills with a blast, with heat, and with radiation. They learned about kilotons and megatons. They learned what countries have nuclear weapons and when each obtained them between 1945 and today. They knew that North Korea has tested one and that Iran is trying to develop one. They knew that Iran is threatening to “wipe Israel off the map.”

A couple of days later I said to the class: “Sarah Palin criticized President Obama’s new nuclear policy saying, ‘It's kinda like getting out there on a playground, a bunch of kids, getting ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, “Go ahead, punch me in the face and I'm not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to with me,”’”

“Good for her,” said a boy. “Is she going to run for president?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m sure she’s thinking about it. Who agrees with Sarah Palin on this?” I asked.

A scattering of hands.

“Who disagrees?”

Another scattering. Most did not to have an opinion one way or the other.

The next day, I told the class that President Obama responded to Sarah Palin’s criticism. “He said, ‘Last I checked, Sarah Palin's not much of an expert on nuclear issues.’” I paused and let them chew on that.

“And he is?” suggested a girl skeptically.

“Well, he does have experts advising him,” I said, “and he would have access to much more information than you or me or Sarah Palin would. He also said, ‘[I]f the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it, I'm probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.’”

“But he hasn’t been president very long and he wasn’t an expert before that,” she said.

“Okay,” I answered.

The next day, I told them, “Sarah Palin has another response to President Obama. She mocked his criticism saying, ‘all the vast nuclear experience that he acquired as a community organizer . . .’ The president was a community organizer in Chicago for fifteen years or so before becoming a state senator and a US senator. Today, he’s in Prague, Czech Republic signing a treaty declaring that the United States would further reduce the number of nuclear weapons we have. He made a speech there last year saying he wants a world without nuclear weapons.”

“Can we do that?” asked a boy. “Can we get rid of our nuclear weapons? What would we do with them”

“We can disassemble them down to the enriched uranium or plutonium that is turned into energy according to the equation E=mc2, but we cannot unmake that material. We can only store it somewhere and guard it. Also, directions for constructing a nuclear weapon can be downloaded from the internet, so a world without nuclear weapons doesn’t seem like a real possibility.”

“How many weapons would it take to destroy the whole world?” asked another boy.

“Nobody knows for sure,” I said, “and I hope we never find out. Some speculate that it would be around 3000 or so.”

“And how many are we going to get down to?”

“Around 1600 in our arsenal, I think, assuming the Senate ratifies this treaty.”

“Hmm,” he said.

Taxing Situation

My wife is ticked off. She finished preparing her taxes and I haven’t. Our dining room table has been covered with my papers for weeks. The printing calculator sits in the midst of slips and invoices for deductible things I paid for in 2009 and I’ve been working on it all when I can find a few hours between jobs. I’ve always hated paperwork, but it’s particularly hard to motivate myself with government paperwork. She did all that for her private counseling practice weeks ago, but I’m still at it for my writing and property-management business and she can’t file until I’m ready.

“Make sure you tell the accountant it’s your fault and not mine,” she said. I filed for an extension and wrote checks for the amount we paid last year - about $11,000 for state and and federal taxes. That’s in addition to what is taken out of my teacher salary for which I claim zero deductions - and I have them take out an additional $150 per pay period. The tax code is much too complicated to figure out, so we pay $3-4 hundred each year to have a CPA do help us with it. Sometime over the next six months, we’ll sit down with her and hope she can show us ways to avoid paying so much.

Half of all Americans, however, do not go through this because they pay no federal income tax. And, according to Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, because of college tuition credits, child credits, and something called the “Earned Income Tax Credit,” rather than write a check to the government, government writes them a check! These are not refunds I’m talking about here. They get more back from the government than was ever deducted from their paychecks - assuming they actually work. They don’t dread April 15th like I do. They look forward to it because it’s a payday. This time every year, money goes out of my account and into theirs.

During the first few years of my 35-year teaching career, government had me under the poverty line because I made less than $10,000 per year with a wife and four children. I cut firewood. We grew a garden, raised animals, drove clunkers, shopped at Goodwill, and ate a lot of soup. We got by and we even look back on those times as among our happiest. The kids are grown now and my wife works. I’m still a teacher but with a little business on the side, so now we’re “rich.” The left moans that “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Maybe it’s time to coin another phrase, such as “The ‘poor’ are getting richer while the ‘rich’ are getting poorer” because of the confiscatory power of government.
The Earned Income Tax Credit alone costs $50 billion a year. For months, I’ve been hearing radio ads in which a Spanish-accented woman tells us how fulfilling it is to work for the United Way telling more and more people about the EITC so they can get money from government too. In his latest column, Mark Steyn cited Congressman Paul Ryan’s claim that 20% of US households get about 75% or their income from the federal government. Another 20% get 40% of their income from federal programs. That’s four out of ten households. Throw in another 11% who are guilt-ridden, trust-funded, limousine liberals and you have a solid voting majority in any national election.

To keep this gravy train on the tracks, government goes further into debt by $1.5 trillion each year. We’re $12 trillion in the hole now, but with Obamacare, we’re frantically digging deeper. The McClatchey Newspapers write that since it passed, “Questions . . . have flooded insurance companies, doctors' offices, human resources departments and business groups. ‘They're saying, “Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?” ’ said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com.”

During the week before election day in 2008, a supporter at one of Obama’s rallies named Peggy Joseph said, “[When he’s elected] I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.”
The top 25% of earners pay 85% of federal income taxes, while the bottom 50% pay only 3% - and that’s after those tax cuts for the “rich” they whine about so much. No wonder they vote for Democrats.

Next on the Democrat agenda is amnesty for about 20 million illegal aliens. That will make voters who don’t pay income tax an even more solid majority. Mark Steyn asks: “If 51 percent can vote themselves government lollipops from the other 49 percent, soon 60 percent will be shaking down the remaining 40 percent, and then 70 percent will be sticking it to the remaining 30 percent. How low can it go?”

Good question.

Government of Anointed Intellectuals

The more government tries to fix something, the worse it gets. New England yankees used to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Government, however, goes by the aphorism “If it ain’t broke, we’ll keep on fixing it ’til it is.”

In his most recent book Intellectuals and Society, economist Thomas Sowell dichotomizes Americans into those who view the world with a “tragic vision” and those who look at it with the “vision of the anointed.” The former believe the world will always be less than perfect, but people have the liberty to pursue happiness - and whether they succeed or fail is up to them. The “anointed,” though, believe they have superior wisdom, and with it, they can perfect the world if people will just do what they say. They would use government to impose their vision on everyone else, like it or not.Thomas Sowell

Those of us with a tragic vision see the Constitution as limiting government, which is a necessary evil. The anointed see the Constitution as something to get around so they can use government to “fix” everything. They see human nature as evolving and perfectible. They see no limit to what legislation can accomplish, and see nothing as immutable because they are anointed with superior wisdom. They believe, for example, that the law of supply and demand can be repealed if they will it. But the supply and demand dynamic isn’t the result of legislation; it just exists - always has and always will - independent of the anointed’s ability to discover it or define it. Government can outlaw drugs, prostitution or child pornography, but if there’s a demand, a supply will emerge. In spite of massive expenditures of money and manpower, the best government can do is reduce the supply somewhat and drive up prices. We learned that between the 18th and 21st Amendments to the Constitution, which were monuments to government overreach. The anointed thought they could ban alcohol and found out they couldn’t. Government could outlaw it, but if people wanted it, and they did, they’d find a way to get it. Smugglers got rich supplying it whether they were moonshiners or mafioso.

Maine’s government can increase taxes on cigarettes, but as local merchants try to tell them over and over, people will  continue to smoke and buy their cigarettes in New Hampshire or elsewhere. Government won’t get more revenue from the increased tax, but less. The same is true of income taxes and mandatory workmen’s compensation insurance. Make them too high and people will find a way to get around them. The underground economy will grow, not government coffers.

Our Founding Fathers rule of thumb was: “That government is best that governs least.” This kernel of wisdom is variously attributed to Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau and, until progressives started  using government to “fix” things in the 20th century, it was the American way. It’s the polar opposite of the anointed progressive mantra, which is: “That government is best that governs most.” In the early days of the century, anointed progressives at least had the decency to abide by the Constitution. To expand government power, they passed four amendments. Two were okay, including the 17th - allowing the direct election of US Senators, and the 19th - giving women the vote. The other two, however, were disastrous. The 16th created the income tax, and the 18th prohibited alcohol. Prohibition was repealed after sixteen years by the 21st Amendment and should have been a lesson on the limits of government for all time, but it wasn’t of course.

Progressives lost power in the 1920s. Then, when faced with economic slowdown, conseervative presidents Harding and Coolidge cut taxes and shrunk government. As a result, the economy thrived. Progressives regained control in the thirties however, and tried to “fix” another economic slowdown by creating a huge government bureaucracy. As a result, they prolonged it and turned it into The Great Depression. It might have gone on even longer if World War II hadn’t started. Nonetheless, progressives were able to give us our first major, unsustainable entitlement - social security - which is now bankrupt.

After an 8-year respite under Eisenhower, progressives came back with Johnson’s Great Society which gave us another major, unsustainable, bankrupt entitlement: Medicare. If conservatives hadn’t taken over Congress in 1994, progressives in the Clinton Administration would have given us still another major, unsustainable entitlement: socialized medicine for everyone. Now, in spite of a $12 trillion federal debt and a projected $100 trillion deficit in Social Security and Medicare entitlements, government is about to “fix” a medical system which is the envy of the world. How long will it take before it resembles the department of motor vehicles and the public schools?

Naturally, the president and the anointed progressives in Congress who imposed this upon the rest of us, have exempted themselves.

Census Nonsense

The 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Our government, however, is the biggest discriminator. It’s obsessed with race, but Americans are so used to it we hardly seem to notice anymore. When teachers get in-service training on how to administer standardized tests, I always make it a point to ask officials why we need to know what race students are and what their national origin may be. There’s always a pause, and then an answer like, “Well, umm, so we can tell how one group does compared to other groups.”

“Yes, but why?” I ask again. “What will you do with that information?”

Sometimes they get irritated at this point and I can tell that they’ve never considered the question and were not prepared to answer it, so they say something like: “We report it up the line.”

“If a racial differential were discovered,” I then ask, “would officials up the line program differently to address it?”

“Probably.”

“Wouldn’t that be racial discrimination, which is supposed to have been illegal since 1964?”

It they hadn’t shown irritation before, they display it at this juncture and say something indignant like, “Well, it would only be to help them,” and then quickly go on to something or somebody else hoping I’ll shut up.

Government always thinks it’s beneficent when it discriminates on the basis of race, or sex, or national origin because it sees itself as conferring an advantage on the downtrodden. What they almost never consider is that by advantaging one group, they’re disadvantaging another. Government officials think themselves pure-hearted and morally superior when compared to anyone else who discriminates, so they think it’s okay when they do it.

Girls, for example, have been advantaged so much in education the past few decades that now, according to the book “Why Boys Fail,” by Richard Whitmire: “Among whites, women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of master’s degrees. Among blacks, the figures are 66 percent and 72 percent.”

Discrimination is wrong no matter who does it. As Martin Luther King summed it up in his famous 1967 speech: “I have a dream that someday my children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” No righteous person could argue with that, but government continues to discriminate. Consider how often you’ve been asked on a form what your race is, what your sex is, or what your religion or national origin may be. Why does government want this information? There’s a legitimate reason for asking a person’s sex because there are real differences between males and females, but race? With its Affirmative Action policies, government ignores “the content of their character” and imposes racial and sexual quotas in all its operations. That’s discrimination no matter how you slice it.

We’ve all seen the US Census form by now. Page one starts by saying: “The census must count every person living in the United States on April 1, 2010.” As far as I know, that’s all the Constitution requires but it’s grown far beyond that. The census helps maintain the republic which, by definition is: “a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.” The census enables to determine representation in a shifting population.

Now, however, the government wants lots of other information, especially whether we’re of “Hispanic origin.” Right after Question 7 asking for Person 1’s age and date of birth, it says: “NOTE: Please answer BOTH Question 8 about Hispanic origin and Question 9 about race. For this census, Hispanic origins are not races.”

Oh. So, for some other census they are? Why?

Question 8 asks: “Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?” There’s a box for “No.” Then there are four boxes including: “Yes, Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano”; “Yes, Puerto Rican”; “Yes, Cuban”; and “Yes, another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin - Print origin, for example, Argentinian, Colombian, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Spaniard, and so on.”

There are no categories for other origins like Irish, German, Jewish, Italian. Why is it just Hispanics government wants to know about?

Question 9 asks: “What is person 1’s race? Mark X in one or more boxes.” Next to each box are categories including: “White”; “Black, African Am., or Negro”; “American Indian or Alaska Native”; “Asian Indian”; “Chinese”; “Filipino”; “Japanese”; “Korean”; “Vietnamese”; and “Other Asian.”

This is racial discrimination, pure and simple, and it’s long past time to end government obsession with it. Question 9 ends with a box next to which it says: “Some other race - print race.”

Please, when you fill out the census form, check that box and print HUMAN.

Making Scents

Every home has a smell, some are pleasant, others unpleasant, most are neutral. A relative who liked to flip houses used to bake bread just before the realtor brought a potential buyer on a walk-through. Other people consciously introduce smells with air fresheners or potpourri. Most home smells, however, are an amalgam created by the ordinary activities of living such as cooking, washing, burning wood, and keeping pets. Homes in which people don’t wash or clean very often smell like that.

For years I had a paper route and on Friday afternoons, I’d knock on kitchen doors to get paid for the week. I’d be invited to stand on the floor mat just inside and I’d get a whiff of over forty homes in just a few hours. Many of my customers cooked the same thing every Friday - usually fried haddock or cod - and I’d notice if they changed routine to macaroni and cheese. There were lots of Catholics who didn’t eat meat on Fridays in those days. In summer when windows were open, I could smell homes nearly every day and I began to appreciate how a dog perceives his world with his nose in the air.
We like whatever smells we’ve been conditioned to associate with something good. As a life-long New Englander, I enjoy seasonal change and my favorite season tends to be whichever one is just arriving. Each has its own smells and it’s usually on a warm day in late February when I detect the first scent of spring. Something thaws upwind and a breeze wafts it to my nose. Though I don’t see it, I visualize a south-facing slope under a white pine with fragrant brown needles warming in the sun. A fond memory is tapped and I savor its associated feelings, but then have to remind myself that it’s a tease and more cold is inevitable before a melt can be sustained. A month later thawing days outnumber freezing ones and spring scents dominate. This March has been unusually warm and last Sunday’s gentle showers after seventy-degree sunshine Saturday re-created that sweet smell of soft rain on warm, dry macadam that usually comes only in summer.When I stopped smoking twenty-five years ago, my olfactory detection system seemed to intensify. It didn’t really of course; it just returned to normal. More memories and feelings from childhood were triggered by scents that had always been around me but were masked by tobacco smoke. The only thing that can approach the strength of smell when evoking old moods might be hearing an old song on the radio.

Fifty years ago my parents got an idea to paint the concrete walls and floor of our basement and set up the Christmas tree down there. There were eight of us kids and there would be more room to spread out all the toys and gifts on Christmas morning. Ever since, the smell of certain oil-based paints sends me right back there.
Often my childhood friends and I would build “forts” that were nothing but a hole in the ground with boards placed across and leaves spread over them for camouflage. We’d spend hours digging in the earth with our fathers’ spades. Now, whenever a backhoe or excavator digs a fresh hole, the smell of fresh dirt triggers a memory of the secure feeling I had sitting in the “fort” like a chipmunk in his den.

When catalytic converters were mandated on new cars, I recall the peculiar odor they produced compared to the exhaust from older cars I was accustomed to smelling. Now they’re ubiquitous and I don’t notice anymore. Then someone will start up an old vehicle and that old smell summons those old memories.

It’s almost a decade since I cut my firewood from the stump which I had done for two decades prior, but I only have to fire up my chainsaw, drop a tree and my nose takes me right back there. A freshly-used landing on a woodlot down the street does the same thing when I walk past it. It’s the still-fresh sawdust and the stumps still oozing sap.My favorite smell these days is the sweet scent of my granddaughter. It’s difficult to describe except to say that it’s the same smell all babies who are loved and cared for have. Together with the feel of her soft hair, her laugh and her smiling face, her smell is a reminder, a reaffirmation, a renewal.

Growing Up

“Kids grow up fast today,” people often say, but not always in ways that benefit society or the kids themselves. They’re usually referring to sexual awareness beginning much earlier than it used to. Girls menstruate earlier than they did in previous generations and we’re not sure why. Increased use of artificial hormones in animals and consumer products is suspect, but there are no certain conclusions and there doesn’t seem to be any corresponding early onset of puberty in boys. Aside from the physical, however, the kind of maturation that would make us productive members of society seems to be slowing down.

Far more American kids go to college today than did in previous generations. Taxpaying adults who underwrite much of their education at both public and private universities have a right to expect that there would be a commensurate increase in the collective wisdom of the generation they’re subsidizing. There are no quantitative methods of measuring wisdom that I know of, but anecdotal observations of today’s college students indicate the opposite is occurring, and unless they’re studying hard science or engineering, what they’re learning academically is often less valuable than what they might otherwise learn in the working world.

Yet public schools constantly tell students they won’t be successful unless they go to college and I’ve been thinking that’s not such a good idea. Many accepted as freshmen are deemed unqualified to take college writing or college math unless they first take remedial courses for full tuition, but for no credit. How then, I ask, did they ever pass high school English or high school math? Other high school seniors who insist they’re going to attend college don’t seem to know why. Either they’re not sure what they want to major in or they change several times during their college career and take an average of six years to finish a four-year course of study - often piling up huge debt the whole time. When they finally graduate, they’re almost as likely to move back in with their parents as go out and get a job. What can they do with a degree in Art History, Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, or Queer Studies anyway?

They could go on a quest to “find themselves” as so many young people claim to have been doing since the screwball sixties, while the rest of society enables an ever-extending adolescence. Democrats pushing health care “reform,” recently attached President Obama’s plan to forgive their student loans which for many are well into the tens of thousands. They also want government and insurance companies to continue medical coverage for “children” up to age 25 or 26. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the other day: "Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance." As Mary Katherine Ham writes in The Weekly Standard last week, “If [liberals] insist on creating a generation unable to care for itself up to and past the ripe old age of 26 by incentivizing ‘children’—and I use to term loosely— to stay on parent's health insurance policies until they're turning the corner from Clearasil to Botox, there will be fewer educated, able-bodied people who ever learn to take care of themselves.”

Two generations ago, far fewer Americans went to college and I’m not sure that was a bad thing. There was some crazy behavior on campus but nothing compared to what it’s like today. Even though wealthy parents bailed their “kids” out of various scrapes, there were behavioral standards at most colleges beyond which nobody was allowed to go regardless of how influential a family they came from. The late Senator Ted Kennedy was twice expelled from Harvard when he was caught cheating.

After World War II, thousands of veterans went to college on the GI Bill, but they tended to be focused and businesslike in their study habits - even compared to the more-diligent students common back then. A friend who was an undergraduate in the late ’40s described what it was like when returning GIs started attending his classes. They were impatient with small talk, he said, and they expected to be learning every minute. Professors stepped up their pace and everyone treated the new older students with great deference. Contrast that with today’s returning GIs who are flagged as possible domestic terrorists by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Colleges that won’t allow ROTC or military recruiters to set foot on campus aren’t prone to respect returning veterans either.

If parents choose to support their offspring beyond eighteen that’s their business, but government shouldn’t require everyone to contribute - especially those of us who know they’d grow up much faster if they had to take care of themselves.

Change is Coming

People are worried. More worried than I ever remember. If they’re not out of work, they know others who are. Highly skilled tradesmen are taking on whatever comes their way - jobs they never thought they’d do - because the phone isn’t ringing like it used to. They don’t see an end to it and they don’t expect it to get better. They expect it to get worse - a lot worse. That’s what worries them. And these are reliable people, those who have always taken care of business, of themselves, and of others, have always paid their taxes, have done everything above board.

Others who have hidden income in the underground economy, who have relied on government for unemployment checks, for free health care, and many other government programs, are still doing that, but their phones aren’t ringing at all. They’re calling others in search of work but not finding much. They’ve hired on occasionally with the reliable ones, but those occasions are fewer and farther between. Lately they’ve had more time to stand around with their hands in their pockets listening to anxious talk from those who pay attention to the wider world and understand it a bit. They don’t like what they’re hearing and now they’re worried too.
Then there are those who have never taken care of themselves, who have depended totally on government. They’re still going along as they always have, but they’re noticing the world is slowing down. Businesses are closing. Others aren’t open as much and shelves are empty. They don’t know it yet, but their lives are about to get harder.

Anybody who pays attention has seen it coming for a long time. Political leaders though, acted like it would all go on forever and most voters believed them. A growing number depend on government for everything and don’t know any other way, but with illegal immigration and refugee resettlement, we’re supporting tens of millions of foreigners as well. Some think we can support the whole world. Citizens want to seal the border, but government refuses. Republicans refuse because business constituents like the cheap labor and Democrats refuse because illegals will vote for them after amnesty. Ordinary citizens steam as their government sends so many checks to so many people it can’t cover them anymore. Rather than cut back, it has borrowed from foreigners who don’t want to lend any more. So the Federal Reserve is printing money.

The gravy train is derailing. Some of us know it. Other sense it. Most remain oblivious. Cities and towns can’t pay bills and can’t get help from states that are bankrupt. States can’t get help from a federal government in debt $14 trillion. There’s no backstop anymore. We’ve reached the end. Yet the president and Congress are still pushing health care “reform” for $2 trillion and trashing Senator Jim Bunning for asking where we’re going to get $10 billion to extend unemployment benefits. Because he pointed out that things simply cannot go on like this anymore, Bunning was trashed by Republicans as well.

The dollar is collapsing. The Euro is collapsing. It’s all going to collapse - and very soon - unless we cut everything and cut it deeply. It’s an election year and we should be hearing candidates tell us to cut government back hard now or disintegrate into anarchy, but we’re not. In bankrupt California last week, spoiled college students took to the streets over a raise in fees that will make it difficult for them to buy kegs of imported beer. Imagine what will happen when we raise retirement age, stop cost of living raises, cut entitlements 10% a year, seal the border, impose stiff fines on employers of illegal immigrants, and lay off government workers. It’s either going to happen methodically or everything will just fall apart at once, but it will happen.

Just as animals sense an earthquake, unease is spreading. The new president’s honeymoon ended when people began to realize that his plan to spend us out of recession has only hastened a collapse into depression. States now talk openly of nullification, of resurrecting the 10th Amendment, even of secession.

Change is coming. Not the kind for which people thought they were voting in ’08, but big change nonetheless. Hold on tight.

Defining The Enemy

How are we going to win this war unless we can identify our enemies? Some of us have been referring to them as Islamofascists or Radical Muslims and both labels fit, but imperfectly. As I learn more about them I become more confused, and it’s not supposed to be that way. The situation should become clearer after gaining more knowledge. In two columns - last year and again last month - I described a conversation I had with a former advisor to our Joint Chiefs of Staff. He told me that our top military and political leaders were being advised by agents of the very people we’re fighting against. He came out of the closet at CPAC in Washington a couple of weeks ago and I was in the audience.Stephen Coughlin at CPAC 2010

His name is Stephen Coughlin, and he gave an overview of the thesis he delivered to the Joint Chiefs that got him fired. To sum up, he laid out a convincing case that radical Muslims, or “Islamists,” are following the dictates of the Quran more closely than our moderate Muslim allies do. Al Qaeda means “the foundation, the base,” for a reason. He said the older, more peaceful verses in the Quran were abrogated by the later, more aggressive verses our enemies follow. Our moderate Muslim allies are akin to what some in the Catholic Church call “cafeteria Catholics.” That is, Catholics who pick what aspects of the religion they like and reject the rest. Many Catholics support abortion and homosexual “marriage,” though the Church explicitly rejects both. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry, for example, are prominent pro-choice Catholics, but Catholic leaders are starting to get tough. Recently, a Rhode Island bishop refused the Eucharist to Congressman Patrick Kennedy because of his public endorsement of abortion. According to Coughlin, Muslims who follow the Quran and Islamic Law (Sharia) closely are the ones with whom we’re at war. Our moderate allies are, if you will, “cafeteria Muslims,” and more of them have been killed by the radicals than have Christians and Jews.

This is very troubling, because it negates what Presidents Bush and Obama claim: that “Islam is a religion of peace.” While most Muslims are peaceful, thank God, the fundamentalists are gaining. They’re perceived as “the strong horse” by an increasing percentage of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, especially the expatriates and their offspring living in the UK, France, Holland, Sweden and other European countries. They’re in the United States too, as we learned last November when native-born jihadist Major Nidal Hassan killed thirteen “infidel” soldiers at Fort Hood and wounded dozens of others.

Holland, the most liberal country in Europe, is wrestling very publicly with exactly this issue: Who or what is our enemy? Is it a religion? A set of teachings? A book? Writing in The Wall Street Journal, novelist Leon De Winter says:

What started as a trial against Geert Wilders for alleged Islamophobia has nearly turned into its opposite: a historical case about the message of the Quran. The Amsterdam court trying the controversial Dutch politician is now preoccupied with the question of whether this book, sacred to more than a billion believers, can be compared to one of the most vile publications in the history of Western civilization—Hitler's "Mein Kampf."

Geert Wilders and me at CPAC 2009

Wilders, a member of the Dutch Parliament and leader of the Freedom Party, insists that the Quran is political as well as religious because it encourages it’s followers to subjugate or kill Jews, Christians and anyone else who doesn’t believe in Islam. The Dutch government charged Wilders with “hate speech” for pointing this out. However, as De Winters says: “On trial is not so much Geert Wilders, but the Holy Book of Islam.” Holland’s hate crime laws, then, are in direct conflict with freedom of speech, and with truth itself because Wilders quoted both books quite accurately. The country’s ruling multiculturalists will lose if they convict Wilders, and they will lose if they exonerate him. They’re wishing now that they never brought him to trial at all because whatever they do, they cannot refute Wilders’ claim that Holland is being forced by multiculturalists to tolerate the intolerable.

Wilders’ positions resonate in European cities with sizable Muslim populations in which homosexuals, women and Jews are afraid to walk in Muslim neighborhoods for fear of being beaten or raped. By trying to silence Wilders, the hollow rhetoric of the tolerant, multicultural, diversity-celebrating, ruling elite of the European Union is being exposed. No matter which way the Wilders trial is decided, the world will be forced to acknowledge that fundamentalist Islam, or “Islamism” is incompatible with the democratic ideals of western civilization.

This is exactly what European and American leaders are afraid to admit. As Stephen Coughlin put it: “You cannot defeat an enemy you are not allowed to define.”