Robin Hood Rebates

Molly at North Conway, NH WALMART service desk

Great news from the government! Tax rebate checks are coming! Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told us last Thursday that: “Tens of millions of Americans will get a check in the mail.” What a country! Even people who didn’t pay any taxes at all are going to get a “rebate.” Isn’t that wonderful?

Those who paid the most taxes last year, however, aren’t going to get anything back. No rebates for them. That’s the deal our inarticulate president got when he emerged from his emergency meetings with the bug-eyed Democrat Speaker from San Francisco. You know her. She’s the one always complaining about tax breaks for the rich. In case you were wondering where all the billions in “rebate” money for the non-taxpaying check recipients is coming from, it’s coming from those rich taxpayers. The top 10% of Americans pay about 70% of all federal income taxes - and they’re not getting rebates. The top 50% of Americans pay more than 96% of those taxes. The bottom 50% of Americans, who would be considered rich in most parts of the world but are viewed as marginalized here, pay less than 4% of all federal income taxes. The bottom 75% pay only 14%. They’re the ones, however, who are getting nearly all the “rebates.”

Who said Robin Hood was dead? Seems like he’s alive and well in Washington, DC. It’s like Sherwood Forest and the Big Rock Candy Mountain all rolled into one. Fired up by the spirit of this “economic stimulus package” our leaders have worked out for us, I dropped into the local WALMART in North Conway, NH and waited in line at the service desk. When my turn came, I asked the woman behind the counter for a refund. “On what?” she asked because I hadn’t put anything on the counter.

“You mean I have to buy something to get a refund?”

“Uh-huh,” she said and pointed to the word “items” on the Return Policy sign behind her.

“You mean WALMART isn’t going along with the economic stimulus package worked out in Washington?” I asked, after explaining the deal our leaders made that very day.

“Nope,” she said.

“What if it works? What if our economy booms after everyone gets their rebate checks? Will WALMART get into the spirit then and give refunds to people who didn’t buy anything? It could be great for business.”

“If we did that, the line of people here would be all the way out the door,” she said, gesturing toward the parking lot outside.

No wonder liberals hate WALMART. Did you notice how the audience jeered at Hillary Clinton during the debate in South Carolina when Barack Obama pointed out that she served as a corporate lawyer for the WALMART board of directors? Evidently WALMART doesn’t care about people as much as Democrats in the US House do. If it did, it would give money to people whether they bought anything or not. But then Nancy Pelosi and most other Democrats give away other people’s money, and WALMART would have to give away its own.

That made me wonder how much of their own money liberal Democrats give to charity. I remembered reading that the past two Democrat candidates for president, Al Gore and John Kerry, gave very little of their own money to charity compared to their opponent, George W. Bush. Then I did some research. “The Chronicle of Philanthropy” in its November, 2006 edition reports that: “. . . religious conservatives are far more charitable than secular liberals, and that those who support the idea that government should redistribute income are among the least likely to dig into their own wallets to help others.”

Hmm. Come to think of it, Robin Hood didn’t give away his own money either. He robbed the rich with bows and arrows and gave their money away instead. Liberal Democrats use the IRS instead of bows and arrows but it amounts to the same thing. It’s not their own money they’re so generous with. It’s other people’s money. It’s my money.

This stuff all sounded great to me when I was an impecunious teacher with a wife and three kids back in 1979. The federal government classified me as poor because my income put my family below the federal poverty line. I’m still a teacher but I have two other jobs as well. My wife has worked also since the kids grew up. Now this Robin Hood thing doesn’t sound so great because the Democrats think I’m rich. I pay a lot of taxes and I’m not sure I’ll qualify for this “rebate” after Harry Reid and the Senate get through tweaking it.

WALMART isn’t going to give me anything and I may not get any rebate check in the mail either, no matter what our bug-eyed Speaker Pelosi says. I’m thinking maybe I should stop working so hard.

The Choosing Process

Photo from Yahoo
Though I expected to be bored at this point with the longest presidential campaign in history, I’m not. My students are quite taken up with it too. That makes my job easier because I’m charged with teaching them civics, but it also energizes my interest. Here in January, my students are about as sophisticated as the adult voting populace, or as unsophisticated, as the case may be. They’re a window through which I can study my fellow Americans and why they vote (or not) as they do (or don’t). Most students hear what their parents say about candidates and echo it, and that’s how political awareness begins for most of us. Some parents pay no attention to politics, don’t vote and, with a few exceptions, their kids aren’t particularly interested either. In this little laboratory that is my schedule of classes every day, several patterns became more obvious during this election cycle.

One is the herd mentality. Five distinct groups of fourteen-year-olds file in and out of my classroom most days and each is unique because of the students in it. Some students influence the rest without knowing it. They’re trendsetters who don’t try to sway others but they do. They seem unaware that others emulate them. When I ask a class to raise their hands if they support Candidate A and they see the trendsetter raise his/her hand, many will raise theirs too. They’re not all followers. Some are independent thinkers but they’re a distinct minority. The herd mentality influences adult American voters fully as much as fourteen-year-olds I think. It’s manifest in the caucus process when voters declare which candidate they support by a show of hands or by standing in a particular corner of a room. It’s less of a factor in a primary when voters make their choices in a private voting booth where no one else can see. When they’re returning to their cars and someone taking exit polls sticks a microphone in their faces, they can tell the truth or not. Many don’t, I suspect.

Another pattern is the tendency to vote for a candidate because of what identity group he/she represents. When I ask students why they support Hillary Clinton, most say they want a woman to become president. When I ask Obama supporters why they would vote for him, they say it’s time we had a black president. Students have had many lessons on the Democrat Party’s positions on issues and the Republican Party’s as well, so I’m disappointed when they ignore a candidate’s platform and make up their minds based on race or sex. Then I have to remind myself that too many Americans choose our leaders using the same criteria. It is, unfortunately, the way we are.

Perhaps it would be better to say it’s the way we have been so far. There’s still hope that we’ll move beyond our obsession with skin color some day, but our sexual distinctions are real. In spite of liberal feminist denials, there really are differences between men and women. There always have been and always will be no matter what Women’s Studies departments claim. That’s not to say I’d have a problem voting for a woman. As with men, my vote would depend on who that woman is and what she says she’ll do. I would never have voted for Shirley Chisholm, Pat Shroeder or Geraldine Ferraro. I’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton either and those are the only women who have run since I’ve been voting. If, however, Margaret Thatcher were a native-born American and running for president, I’d vote for her over any man in the race today, Democrat or Republican.

Last week, formerly-leftist writer Christopher Hitchens pointed out how Democrats’ obsession with color and sex is haunting them in this primary process. Early on, it looked like Democrat voters were starting to get beyond it as pollsters reported Barack Obama having more support among women than Hillary Clinton - and she had more support among people who think of themselves as black than Obama did. Lately, however, Democrats have returned to their traditional politics of sex and color and the tribes are lining up accordingly.

Hitchens defined a racist as: “one who believes that there are human races.” By that definition, virtually the entire Democrat Party is racist. It insists the US Census continue categorizing Americans according to “race” even though biologists insist there are no such things as races. Democrats insist on maintaining skin-color preferences in hiring, awarding contracts, and assigning students to schools.

My hope is that someday all of us, even Democrats, will realize there’s only one race - the human race - and we all belong to it. Then, perhaps, we’ll abandon that most primitive of our voting patterns.

Twilight of the Culture

Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco 9/30/2007. Photo from Zombietime

What can we say about a culture that doesn’t want to reproduce itself? That’s what is happening in Europe, Canada, and now even in the United States - centers of Western Civilization all. What’s going on? Native-born European women aren’t bearing children at anywhere near a sustainable rate. Indeed, they’re having so few that their demographic will be reduced by half every generation. Meanwhile, Muslim immigrant women in Europe are having children at a rate that doubles their population in the same intervals. Should present trends continue, Europe as we know it will cease to exist in half a century. It will become Eurabia. A similar trend the United States is not yet so acute but it’s trending in that direction, and the immigrant population is predominantly Mexican. Our most populous state has been called Mexifornia by some.

Why have western women chosen not to reproduce as they use to? Maybe they’ve lost confidence in men as husbands and fathers. Maybe they think western culture is inferior and don’t want to bring children into it. Maybe they’re unwilling to make the physical, temporal, financial, and emotional sacrifices necessary to raise a child, or more than one child. Maybe the question doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s just a phenomenon of social Darwinism that if one demographic group chooses to make itself extinct, another takes its place.

A significant portion of my fellow baby boomers are worried that they may not become grandparents. Some have no grandchildren at all and others have only one or two because their children don’t want to bear children. I wrote about this recently and it seemed to touch a nerve. Some agreed with my suggestion that the dearth of grandchildren was due to one or more factors such as selfishness, indifference, or just plain laziness on the part of boomer offspring. Most responses, however were indignant attempts to refute those suggestions, or they were scornful declarations that it was none of my business whether people reproduced or not, that it was a private decision and should not be scrutinized by anyone, especially me. Others made Malthusian arguments that our planet cannot sustain any more people and their decisions not to reproduce were therefore morally correct.

America’s libido is certainly strong enough. That’s not the problem. We’re nothing if not sex-obsessed, but a critical mass in western culture disassociates sex from reproduction and family. After intense and prolonged pressure from leftist women’s and homosexual groups, certain non-reproductive versions of sexual behavior which used to exist only in the shadows were declared constitutional rights by activist judges. Abortion to further divorce sex from reproduction is also a constitutional right. Paradoxically, one of the euphemisms for abortion employed by women’s groups is “reproductive freedom.” They don’t mean freedom to have children. They mean they’re free to refuse children even when they’re pregnant - free to vacuum babies out of their wombs by the millions. They’re free to pretend that it’s nobody else’s business either - that nobody else in the culture should have a right even to voice disapproval. Europe and Canada have “Human Rights Commissions” and the like which are functioning to harass anyone who does so, as in the case of Alberta Pastor Stephen Boission who was convicted of “hate speech” for writing a letter to the editor critical of pro-homosexual propaganda in the province’s schools.

Reproduction is not the only function of sex, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not the most important function for any culture or society that wants to avoid extinction. If sexual minorities have “rights” to not only practice, but publicize their behavior using taxpayer money, other taxpaying members of that culture should at least be able to discuss the subject without legal harassment. It’s simply madness to muzzle them, but that’s exactly what’s happening. Now those groups redefine marriage and family to include homosexual couples - insisting by all these measures that western culture put its imprimatur on a scheme to dismantle itself. Some states and provinces and even countries have outlawed use of words like “husband” and “wife” as discriminatory.

Words follow thoughts. Orwell was right to warn us in his novel “1984” about Big Brother’s inclination to dispatch the Thought Police when thinking got politically incorrect. He was a bit premature by predicting his nightmare society would manifest in the late 20th century. The big-government left was just getting geared up then. They’re finding their stride in the early 21st, so watch what you say if you don’t want to be hauled before the tribunal. If you think it’s bizarre that your culture is more concerned about polar bears and trees than people, that it wants to protect bath house sex and abortion more than babies and then spoonfeed their propaganda to schoolchildren with your tax money, you better shut up about it or the Thought Police will be coming for you.

How To Help

An old priest told me of a lesson he learned in seminary. His instructor asked the class to speculate about what percentage of the people seated in the pews on any given Sunday was suffering. Seminarians estimated five percent, fifteen percent, twenty percent, etc. The priest guessed it was thirty-three percent. All wrong, said the instructor. The correct answer was a hundred percent. All the people looking up from their pews were suffering.

Many times I’ve looked around in church and wondered about this. Is it true? Does everybody suffer? Some of us carry it well and others of us wear it on our sleeves, but I don’t think anybody escapes. It seems that some of us suffer more than others, but that’s hard to measure because suffering is subjective and non-transferable. There are, perhaps, some people whose lives are so short and whose deaths are so quick that they don’t suffer much, but we don’t know for sure.

When the subject has come up in my classes, I ask students their opinions about what kind hurts most: physical pain or emotional/spiritual suffering. Generally about six of ten believe emotional/spiritual pain is worse than physical pain. This is from from fourteen-year-olds at a melodramatic stage of life. They tend to use crutches and ace bandages longer than necessary to milk every drop of empathy. Some exaggerate limps and talk endlessly about how much something hurts. Others, however, sustain painful injuries or lose a family member through death, desertion or addiction but bear it stoically. Still, most believe physical pain is not so hard to bear as spiritual/emotional pain.

There is an affinity between people who suffer. They bond because they sense an empathy in one another and recognize when someone is in pain more quickly than they otherwise would. They’re more willing to offer relief. Nearly everyone is inclined to help when they see suffering in their presence except for a distinct minority present in every society - those we call sociopaths. Sociopaths are by definition incapable of putting themselves in someone else’s shoes - so totally selfish they don’t fit in anywhere - not even with others like themselves.

Early in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it was believed that when someone was visited with suffering, it was because he or she had fallen out of favor with God, that some evil was present in the one suffering. The Old Testament’s Book of Job offers one such scenario. As he loses his family and his riches, Job’s neighbors wonder what evil he had done to bring such suffering onto himself. The Nation of Israel suffered when it strayed from God’s laws and learned there is some redemptive quality in suffering. Christians share this idea.

Those who reject religious explanations for suffering usually blame government or economic systems for it. They believe it’s possible to create a community in which everything is distributed equally, with no rich and no poor, that each of us can work for the good of all. In the 19th century, secular utopian groups tried many times to create societies to implement such egalitarian principles. They pooled their resources and established themselves on the fringes of society. Some survived years, even decades, but eventually broke up. In the 20th century Russia and China established such systems throughout their whole nations. Russia turned into the Soviet Union and survived seven decades before disintegrating. China started later and is still operating, though it’s gradually transitioning to capitalism.

Somewhere between twenty and sixty million people suffered and died in the Soviet Union in the effort to transform it into a “perfect” society. Ironically, the net effect of their effort to reduce human suffering was to greatly exacerbate it. In China too, tens of millions died in purges like the Cultural Revolution to “purify” their movement. German National Socialism purged religion and killed millions in a dozen-year attempt to create a thousand-year Reich.

Within Christianity, various religious orders established societies within the larger church which have survived for centuries. It’s also true that Christian sects made war on one another during the Reformation. There were purges like the Spanish Inquisition in which thousands suffered and died. Crusades between Christians and Muslims lasted nearly two centuries and produced about 1.5 million dead.

Historical efforts to reduce human suffering from both religious and secular groups have shown successes and failures. Religious efforts, however, have lasted much longer than secular ones. Much more striking though have been the failures. Those are many, many times more deadly in secular, atheist societies than in religious ones.

History has shown us that the human condition is anything but a rose garden. We must expect suffering and we must help each other through it. Help is most effective when it’s person-to-person or in small, spiritual groups - and least effective when forced by big government.

Heterosexual White Guy Journalists Association

There’s a need out there and I have undertaken to fill it. It’s my great pleasure to announce the formation of the Heterosexual White Guy Journalists Association, or HWGJA (hah-wug-jah). Minorities have taken steps to improve the way they’re portrayed in media and now it’s our turn to burnish our image, which has been getting trashed for many years now.

There’s the Association for Women Journalists on whose web site it says: “AWJ promotes the fair treatment of women in the media and the promotion of women in the newsroom through a scholarship program, career grants, networking, advocacy, career seminars . . .”

Then there’s the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association which proclaims: “NLGJA is an organization of journalists, media professionals, educators and students that works within the news industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of LGBT issues.” In case you’re not hip to what LGBT means, it’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender. That last is a new word for what we use to call a transvestite or a cross-dresser, or it could mean someone whose gone even further and had plastic surgery to either remove a penis or implant a facsimile. The latter procedure is what Rush Limbaugh calls an “adadictomy.”

There’s the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Native American Journalists Association, and - get this - both the Asian American Journalists Association and the South Asian Journalists Association. What’s up with that? Why is there a need for two Asian Journalists Associations? Can’t the AAJA just have a department like the South Asian Subcommittee or something like that? As founder and president of HWGJA, I intend to form special departments like the Republican Bureau (wouldn’t be any need for a Democrat bureau - see explanation below), the Jock Committee, the Redneck Panel, and the Unmedicated ADHD Task Force. I don’t know if the task force will ever get anything accomplished, but they’ll certainly be active.

As HWGJA president, I intend to apply for membership in the National Association of Multcultural Media Executives, or NAMME (nah-mee). I know what you’re thinking: heterosexual white guys are in the majority, right? Well, if NAAME refuses me membership I intend to sue, just as soon as HWGJA gets a legal department. I’ve already done the research into our minority status and my conclusion is that heterosexual white guys are definitely outnumbered in the profession. Take television journalism, for instance. You’ll have a hard time convincing me that Matt Lauer is exclusively heterosexual. No HWG gets excited about the latest designs in wedding dresses like Matt does. And when he’s not there, David Gregory fills in. Ever see Mr. Gregory sashaying to music with Meredith and Al outside the studio in New York City? At best, Lauer and Gregory are metrosexuals. They’ve had so much makeup applied to them so often, something’s happened to them. Males on other networks seem little better. We HWGs are definitely in the minority.

White metrosexual journalists covering Washington, DC are overwhelmingly Democrats and that party has become anathema to HWGs. That wasn’t always true, but HWGs have been leaving the Democrat Party for about thirty years now and I don’t think there are any left. Thomas Edsall at The Huffington Post organized a forum recently, asking: “Should the Dems love white guys or dump them?” Edsall was referring to HWGs of course because homosexual men have always been strong Democrats. Various non-HWGs weighed in with comments and the consensus was: “Who needs them? They’re a shrinking demographic anyway, so let them go.” That would explain why the party’s three leading candidates for president are: a woman - Hillary Clinton, a black man - Barack Obama, and a white guy of questionable sexual preference - John Edwards.

All these advocacy groups object when our mass media depict members unfavorably, whether they be black, Hispanic, homosexual, female, Asian, Muslim Arab, or whomever. Amos and Andy is out. So are Brer Rabbit, Little Black Sambo, and Speedy Gonzalez’s cartoon-character sidekick Slowpoke Rodrigues. Public school textbook publishers, for example, can only use images that depict minorities as the advocacy groups insist. Asians cannot be shown in laundries or as academics. Women cannot be portrayed as nurses or receptionists or caring for children. Blacks can’t be shown in an urban environment. All images must be counter to stereotype, even if the stereotype is accurate and substitute images distort reality.

Heterosexual white guys are the only ones left to ridicule or poke fun at, so we’re depicted as heartless oppressors of everyone else in the history textbooks our children read. We’re shown as selfish and stupid on television - like Homer Simpson or Family Guy for example. Behaving as normal boys in the typical public school classroom, we’re diagnosed with ADHD and force-fed amphetamines. At the other end of things, our life expectancy is shorter than that of women. In between our childhood and our death, we’re expected to keep everything running while all the other minority groups whine about how cruel and heartless we are.

My goal for the HWGJA, however, is not to complain about our circumstances the way the other groups whine about theirs. Heck no. Homer Simpson is funny. So is Family Guy. They wouldn’t be funny unless there were some basis in reality for their antics. My goal instead is to maintain a healthy, heterosexual-white-guy sense of humor and thereby provide a contrast to those other groups who desperately need to lighten up. We HWGs have to laugh at them every time people from those hyper-PC advocacy groups feign outrage and indignation at their lot in life and blame us. It’s the only way we're going to stay sane until they all grow up - if they ever do.

My Choice

Time to make up my mind about who I want for president and I’ve narrowed it down to two. Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter drove himself from Manchester to Conway while campaigning in New Hampshire last week. He was doing the best he could with his limited budget and staff. A few days later, former Republican governor Mitt Romney came to Conway with his driver. Two advance men were at The Conway Daily Sun (one of the papers running my column) when I arrived last Saturday morning, twenty minutes early for the interview by the Sun’s editorial board. It’s an example of what it’s like for Hunter as a back-of-the-pack candidate. Romney is among the leaders.

Hunter answers questions with a yes or a no, then explains his position. I interviewed him over the phone last July for the web site Family Security Matters. He knows what he thinks and I agree with him on nearly every issue. He’s is a conservative and always has been - no question about that. I also agree with Romney on nearly every issue, but on some issues important for a conservative like myself, he’s only recently come to the right. Abortion, illegal immigration and gay “marriage” are the biggest examples. That troubles me about Romney just as it does many conservatives when deciding who to support. Then I consider how I’ve moved right myself over the years. I’m an unwavering conservative now, but who am I to doubt Romney? Perhaps it’s an advantage to know how the other side thinks so as to be able to work with them when hammering out deals in congress? On the other hand, having a president whose conservative principles are bred in the bone the way Hunter’s are is comforting, especially after seeing what President George W. Bush has done with the growth of government and illegal immigration.

Hunter is a former soldier. He served two combat tours in Vietnam jumping out of helicopters. He’s served on the House Armed Services Committee for twenty-two years. When Republicans controlled the House, he was chairman. We’re at war and will continue to be for the foreseeable future and we need experience like his. Hunter’s son served three terms in Iraq as a Marine. There’s little question that Hunter would make an effective commander-in-chief. Romney’s military background? He doesn’t have any. That doesn’t disqualify him, but it’s a weakness if you’re going to lead a country in wartime. As governor of Massachusetts, he ordered the state police not to guard former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami, a supporter of Islamic terrorism, when Harvard foolishly invited him to speak in Cambridge. Good move, but that’s about the extent of Romney’s foreign policy experience.

Hunter has a determination about him that shows in his face and in his manner. He looks like a warrior. Romney looks like he was sent over by central casting. That can be an advantage, but it can also be off-putting. Hunter has little administrative experience except as a junior officer in the army. He’s a legislator. Romney, however, has had vast experience as a business executive, running the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and as governor of Massachusetts. In all three capacities, he’s been extremely effective. This is a clear advantage for Romney because the president is, after all, the chief executive.

Both men speak well. Hunter is direct. Romney is smooth. Each has his strength and we’ve seen how important communication skills are over the past seven years by observing George W. Bush’s lack of them. The president of the United States leads the most powerful country in history and is a major world leader as well. It’s important for him to explain things to the American people and encourage them to follow his lead during troubled times. Watching President Bush trip over his words when he wasn’t reading from a script has been embarrassing at times. Both Hunter and Romney would be improvements, but again, Romney has an advantage here as well.

There are more candidates in this presidential election than I can remember in my lifetime and I’ve been voting for thirty-five years. It’s also been one of longest elections in our history and it’s still almost a year away. We’ve seen and heard commercials and debates by candidates for both parties, so there’s been ample opportunity for us to make up our minds about whose name to put a check next to. I’ve had the opportunity to personally speak to and ask questions of six - four Republicans and two Democrats. All are good at relating to people. I’m finally mature enough to realize that I’ll never find a perfect candidate on everything. Each is flawed in some way just as we all are.

Though Hunter is the most conservative candidate and a good, courageous man as well, would I be wasting my vote for someone who has never risen above the low single digits in opinion polls? Shouldn’t I vote for Romney and help him get by Huckabee, McCain, Giuliani and Thompson who are leading the pack? Maybe, but there’s only one poll that really matters - the one in the voting booth. If I don’t vote for the man I believe would make the best president, wouldn’t I be further corrupting the process? Each of us had to use his brain and his gut to determine whom to vote for. I have. Maybe I’m a sucker the underdog, but I’m voting for Duncan Hunter. I urge you to do the same.

Bethlehem, Then and Now

Political Poster in Bethlehem

The Bethlehem of 2007 years ago when Jesus Christ was born bears little resemblance to the Bethlehem of 2007, which I visited last May. Or does it?

Growing up in New England - land of the white Christmas, I sang carols in the snow outside my neighbors’ houses. I got cards with shepherds, Persian kings and manger scenes depicting that first Christmas in Bethlehem. How authentic were those images? That’s hard to say, but they were imprinted in my imagination nonetheless, just as they were for millions of others. Bethlehem in 2007, however, didn’t look anything like that.

It’s is a depressing place - literally walled off from greater Jerusalem where I was staying. The wall is about 20 feet high with barbed wire above that. It’s black and ominous with guard towers at regular intervals. From the bus window, I saw it snake down the valley and over the hill in the distance as we inched up toward the security checkpoint. Graffiti, including a large lion devouring a dove, were painted on the wall. The message was anything but “Peace on Earth” or “Good will to men” as we entered the “little town of Bethlehem.” Administered by the Palestinian Authority, Israelis are not welcome there. Tourists are allowed only if guided by Palestinians, which we were. Our bus driver and our guide were Palestinian Christians - a dwindling minority in Bethlehem after comprising the majority for centuries. That’s because the Palestinian Authority is made up of radical Muslims intolerant of other religions. Christians are ruthlessly harassed and are moving away in great numbers. If present trends continue, there won’t be any more Christians in Bethlehem before long.

Inside Bethlehem were overflowing dumpsters and graffiti on the ground-level walls of nearly every building down the main road through town. Men - young, old and middle-aged - loitered on street corners and stairs and smoked. Nearly every one had a cigarette going. Aside from cab drivers and waiters at the restaurants where we ate, I saw no one working, though there was obviously plenty to do just cleaning up trash. There were posters of the late scumbag terrorist Yassir Arafat and, here and there, posters of Hamas terrorists holding AK-47s. The approach to “Shepherd’s Cave” where the carols proclaim that “shepherds watched their flocks by night,” was lined with barbed wire. The bathrooms had no water and the cave entrance, which had been a natural limestone formation, was bricked up with bars on windows. The site of the manger is now inside the Church of the Nativity, which was occupied by Palestinian Muslim terrorists for over a month in 2002. They urinated on the floor, set an adjacent Franciscan study afire, and a statue of Mary was hit by a bullet. Israeli security forces had come to arrest them, so they holed up in the Church of the Nativity and effectively held the holy Christian shrine hostage. The terrorists threatened to blow up the church, which is the oldest in Christendom, unless the Israelis withdrew. The siege broke when Israelis did withdraw and terrorists melted back into Bethlehem’s population.

No. Today’s Bethlehem bears little resemblance to the Christmas cards. Thinking about this for the past few months as Christmas approaches for the the 2007th time, I’m realizing that the Israel Jesus was born into was full of conflict too. Romans occupied it and the Jewish king Herod, who the Romans allowed to stay in power, was no prize. Was he as bad as Arafat? A case could be made. He ordered the slaughter of every male infant in Bethlehem after hearing that a king had been born there. Hamas? Yeah, they’re terrorist scumbags too. They’re rocketing Israel every day from the Gaza strip. When I was there, Hamas and Fatah (considered the “good” Palestinian terrorists by President Bush) were killing each other. During Christ’s time, Jews were chafing under Roman rule. Some kissed up to the Romans while others conducted hit-and-run attacks against them. Romans practiced pagan rituals which were insulting to pious Jews. There was religious and political violence aplenty. John the Baptist was later beheaded by Herod’s son and his cousin, Jesus, was crucified by the Romans after being set up by some Jewish religious leaders.

Though it doesn’t resemble the Christmas cards, the Israel Jesus was born into 2007 years ago wasn’t too awfully different from the country I visited. Political and religious conflict - which were often the same thing, then and now - were either playing out in violence or brewing under the surface waiting to erupt again. Shortly after Jesus Christ’s time, there was a large-scale Jewish revolt. Romans slaughtered a million Jews, destroyed their temple, and scattered the rest in the Great Diaspora. Two thousand years later Israel exists again, but for how long?

One in five people on earth believe the most important lifetime in history began in Bethlehem and ended eight miles away in Jerusalem - so important that we measure time according to what happened before it and what happened after it. Though many try to obsure this by calling our time the “Common Era,” we know that it’s 2007 AD - Anno Domini - the “Year of Our Lord.”

Strange Bedfellows

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” is a generally unsavory principle I use as a history teacher to explain why our country has associated with scumbags at various times. Practical politics dictate that it’s sometimes necessary to do business with a person, a group, or a country with whom we would never associate otherwise. When at war with Hitler’s Germany, for example, we sent military aid to Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union - a country which had murdered more people than the Nazis. We helped Saddam Hussein when he was at war with Iran and we helped the “Mujahideen” who were allied with Osama Bin Laden’s cause when they were at war with the Soviet Union in 1980s Afghanistan. My students grasp the realpolitik behind those unfortunate alliances as a “lesser of two evils” thing. Once our common enemies were vanquished, alliances ended.

Lately, I’ve been using the principle to shed light on the unlikely alliance between the Western political left and Islamofascism. Who could have predicted that leftists, whose most cherished causes include women’s rights, homosexual rights, abortion and pacifism, would be apologists for Islamofascists who are against them all? There’s only one explanation: they both hate Western Civilization and the United States as its epitome. They have a common enemy and it’s us. Islamofascists call us “The Great Satan” and the left calls us “The Evil White Patriarchy.” Islamofascists see us, correctly, as the biggest obstacle to achieving their goals of converting everyone in the world to Islam, restoring the Caliphate, and the universal application of Islamic law - Sharia. Leftists see us, also correctly, as the biggest obstacle to achieving their goals of one-world-government socialism with taxpayer-funded healthcare including abortions, homosexual marriage, and state-mandated multiculturalism.

For example, the liberal ladies on “The View” declined to criticize Sudan for arresting British school teacher Gillian Gibbons whose class named a teddy bear “Muhammad,” even when she was about to get forty lashes and Muslim mobs were literally calling for her head. Co-host Sherri Shepherd said, “. . . you would think that with her being in Sudan, she would know the rules and customs . . .” whereupon Whoopi Goldberg responded, “ . . . you’d think if you were going overseas [you’d be] learning the customs and knowing what is cool and what isn’t cool . . . It’s just one of the reasons we’re called the ugly Americans.” The National Organization for Women declined comment entirely.

Leftists who dominate our universities act as apologists for bizarre Islamofascist practices like female genital mutilation. Referring to a debate at the American Anthropological Society’s Annual Meeting, a New York Times article asks: “Are critics of this practice, who call it female genital mutilation, justified in trying to outlaw it, or are they guilty of ignorance and cultural imperialism?” Hey, maybe it’s okay to snip off a girl’s clitoris, right? What do you think Whoopi? Sherri? Barbara? Let’s hear your views. I’d even listen to Rosie O’Donnell on this one.

How about 200 lashes for the victim of a gang rape in Saudi Arabia? You read that right - the victim. She was raped 14 times by seven men, but she was guilty of getting into a car with a man who was not her relative. Can’t have that.

How about Muslim “honor killings”? In certain Muslim communities, a young woman may be killed by her brothers or her father if she “dishonors” her family by having sex with someone not her husband, even if she’s raped - even if the rapist is one of her brothers. I’m not making this up. This would be an “honor killing” and it’s practiced not only in Muslim countries, but in expatriate Muslim communities in Europe and the United States as well. Occasionally, feminist groups have condemned the practice, but when scholars are invited to college campuses to discuss it, they’re shouted down and accused of “hate speech.” Often discussion of such horrible Islamofascist practices (be warned: this link is disturbing) is banned altogether at our universities because talking about them may be offensive to Muslims. Women’s Studies Departments virtually ignore them.

Then there’s the execution of homosexuals. Records are scant, but some claim reports of 200 to 4000 killed in Iran since the Ayatollahs took over, which could be why Ahmadinejad claimed there were none in his country when he spoke at Columbia recently. Why don't homosexual activists and other leftists protest? Heck, Columbia University won't let our military on campus because of “Don’t Ask - Don’t Tell” but they invite a leader of a country that kills them? Doesn’t make sense unless you apply “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” principle. Both hate America, therefore they’re on the same side.

The only other explanation is that the American and European left is too cowardly to criticize Islamofascists because, unlike Americans, they don’t tolerate criticism. They kill you. It's okay to throw the Eucharist on the floor at St. Patrick's Cathedral, but stay away from mosques. Boy Scouts don’t want homosexual leaders in their tents on camping trips? Go after them. Leave Islamofascists alone.

Growth, Change, Awareness

When I was a boy I didn’t like onions. Didn’t like mushrooms or olives either, but now I like them all. Tastes change. Other things change with age too - like fears. I remember being struck by fear the first time I encountered a dead cat. I was walking alone along a stream bed hunting for frogs and turtles to catch when I smelled something bad. Looking around carefully for the source of the awful odor, I noticed the cat’s head with parts of its jaw and teeth exposed in a hideous expression. It must have been hit by a car on the roadway above where I had left my bike. I could feel the trauma of its death still hanging in the air. Maggots crawled under what fur remained on the rotting corpse. It looked and smelled horrifying and I climbed out of the gully in a panic. I had seen dead frogs, turtles and snakes often, but not a larger mammal like a cat. I had petted cats and now had had a close encounter with a dead one. It struck me hard that everything dies and that some day I would too. That’s what I feared.

We all know this at an intellectual level sure as we’re born, but we usually avoid thinking about it, especially when we’re young. I’d been to funerals for grandparents and seen them laid out in caskets, but with so much make-up on faces and hands folded unnaturally around rosary beads, they looked more like mannequins than humans. That cat delivered me death’s unvarnished reality at an emotional level.

While a college student I worked as an orderly at a Massachusetts state hospital on the second shift. It was a chronic-care facility and people didn’t get better and go home. They only left when they died. When one did, part of my job was to wash the body, attach a toe tag, wrap it in a shroud, and take it down to the morgue. My first week there I had three. Luckily I was partnered with an experienced orderly because I was freaked. After a few months though, I got used to it. I had taken care of some patients for months as they got closer to their deaths and sometimes I discussed the subject it with them. I played cribbage with them. I met their relatives. I fed them, lifted them into bed, changed them, joked with them. Some died serenely. Others were consumed by fear. The difference was in how they perceived their deaths. After they passed, it was plain to me that they still existed somewhere, just not in the bodies I knew. As I took their empty bodies to the morgue where the undertaker would pick them up, I realized they had ceased to be people - they were more like abandoned houses no one lived in anymore.

Death can still scare me, but not my own. What I fear is the pain I’ll feel if a loved one should die before I do. There’s nothing I can do about that potentiality, so when it intrudes I put it out of mind. After two and a half years on that orderly job, some of death’s mystery dissipated. Awareness that it’s a certainty for each of us doesn’t diminish life - just the opposite actually. It enriches life. I don’t want to know when death is coming, but I’m better when I live like it could come soon.

Out for a sunset drive in my truck the other night, my wife and I drove up to the top of a hillside cemetery in Waterford and parked. The sun had set and we looked down the hill irregular lines of stones with hills beyond in fading twilight. A full moon came up and the air was crisp. Being in a cemetery at night used to scare me but I’m comfortable with it now. I guess that’s because I know now that death isn’t the end. It’s only the end of a stage and the beginning of another. Time was I had doubts about whether that was really true, but those doubts are gone now. I don’t feel the need to convince others because we all have to come to it in our own way. So don’t worry: I’m not going to preach. I only mention it because it changes the way I look at things - not just death, but almost everything. I don’t doubt anymore that there will be something beyond, but sometimes I forget it. Sometimes for hours I forget it, but then one thing or another will remind me. It might be a baby, a sunset, gently-falling snow, a smile - many different things can spark me to know it again. The duration of those forgetful periods is getting shorter. I hope there’ll come a time this side of the grave when the awareness is constant.

Lacking Generosity

Grandpuppies and grandkitties. When aging baby boomers talk about the newest generation, that’s the lament I’m hearing from many. They wish they could take care of grandchildren for a weekend when their grown-up children go away, but there aren’t any grandchildren because their grown-up sons and daughters aren’t producing any. Instead, they raise dogs and cats, so they ask their boomer parents to watch their pets for them when they go to Bermuda or Cancun, or wherever. That’s what it has come to. It’s one unforeseen result of the fervent boomer belief that our planet is overpopulated.

Boomers grew up during the fifties when families produced a lot of children. When their turn came, however, they wanted fewer children than their “Greatest Generation” parents raised. Was it because birth control became more widely available? Must be a factor since they were certainly having sex often enough. This they proclaimed to the world as their “sexual revolution.” They separated sex from reproduction and family life, claiming marriage and family were too constricting. The institutions which had held society together for millennia were “oppressive.” “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one[s] you’re with.” Opposite sex? Same sex? Both? Didn’t matter. Boomers “liberated” themselves. They insisted it was all to the good. They still do in spite of mountains of contrary evidence. The Democrat Party platform reflects their “values.”

In spite of birth control, all that sex resulted in many pregnancies. “Liberated” feminists insisted they had a constitutional right to abortion and convinced a liberal majority on the US Supreme Court of this. Boomers would abort the children they didn’t want and many would insist that government (meaning people other than them) pay for the ones they did want. Democrats called it the “War on Poverty.” Forty years hence they say “It Takes A Village” to raise a child. It’s the same concept though. Fathers and Mothers aren’t important anymore. They would get rid of “Mothers’ Day” and “Fathers’ Day,” claiming such terms are “sexist.” They insist gender roles are artificial but homosexuality is natural. Government knows what is best for kids, not parents. How will government pay for all this? Raise taxes on the “rich” or course. The rich are defined as people other than them.

Not all boomer-raised children swallow that entire philosophy. They avoid children because raising kids is very expensive, requiring a lot of work and enormous sacrifice of time and emotional energy. They pursue a lifestyle in which kids would just be a drag. If they should get lonely, it’s much easier to get a dog or a cat. They can be left alone all day without a babysitter. On extended vacations, they can be boarded somewhere or left with friends or with their boomer parents. If pangs of guilt about their refusal to reproduce should intrude, they can justify their selfishness claiming they’re conserving resources and shrinking their “carbon footprint.” Their “green” lifestyle is saving the earth. They’re doing homage to Gaia. They’re preserving habitat for other organisms by not reproducing themselves.

Aging liberal boomers should be rejoicing that their children are living out their philosophies, but the ones I’ve talked to don’t seem to be. Rather, they seem sad. They feel they’re missing out on something and they are, of course. Western civilization’s advances have enabled them to live longer lives, but they can’t spend those extra years with the grandchildren if their children aren’t producing any. Similar things are happening in Japan where doll manufacturers are now making artificial, robotic dolls which function as surrogate grandchildren for the grandchildless. I’m not kidding.

Population in Europe is declining too. They’ve increased immigration from Muslim countries to the south to compensate, but that is presenting another set of problems and a backlash has begun against it in Holland, Switzerland, Italy, France and Germany. Europe’s population is aging and there are fewer young people to support the old folks because the generation in between hasn’t generated much. Liberal European retirement benefits cannot be sustained much longer.

Lamenting this situation with a Spanish priest I met in Jerusalem last May, I asked him why he thought young Europeans or Americans were not having children. His answer was simple and succinct: “They lack generosity,” he said. I had been inclined to discuss the subject further but I paused. He was right. It was that simple. When all is said and done, that’s what it comes down to. The “It Takes a Village” to raise a child view is misleading. What it really takes to raise a child is generosity and self-sacrifice, so let’s just say it out loud: Village or no village, today’s young people don’t have what it takes.

Cherishing Victimhood

“Well, the cowboys beat the Indians again,” said Rick Doyle, governor of the Passamaquoddy Reservation near Eastport, Maine. He believes Maine voters discriminated against Indians by voting down their second effort to open a casino. “Every time we propose something, we get put down. It feels to me that we continue to be oppressed by the dominant culture.” (Portland Press Herald 11-8-07)

We’ve been hearing it a long time now. Indians are victims. White people took their land and destroyed their way of life. They’re a separate nation within our nation. They receive the benefits of being US citizens as well as maintaining certain other rights the rest of us don’t have like fishing, hunting, educational scholarships and opening casinos. They’re entitled to special treatment.

My wife is half Abenaki. Her mother’s ancestors were Indians from the reservation at St. Francis, Quebec, formerly known as Odonak. My children are one-quarter Abenaki with genealogy records to prove it. One of them learned that she could go to graduate school on scholarship if she could be officially admitted to the “tribe,” so she pursued it. Abenaki tribal headquarters are in Swanton, Vermont near the Canadian border, so she called and wrote to them repeatedly. April, the woman who was chief, was never able to come to the phone and never answered her mail either. After months of this, my daughter and I drove to Swanton with all her paperwork after assurances that the chief would be there on a certain day.

Headquarters were in something resembling an old laundromat. Unused computer stations lined the walls and long tables in the middle. People were playing cards at the tables and smoking so much it was difficult to breathe. Amber stains from years of burning tobacco covered walls and ceiling. The computer stations were piled with papers, dust and other detritus. And, wouldn’t you know it, the head woman wasn’t there. She was out checking an archaeological site at an expanding road project nearby, we were told. We drove out to the site but we couldn’t find her. We spoke to archaeologists from the University of Maine working the site and they were interesting, but they hadn’t seen the head Indian lady either. Back at the headquarters again the chief still among the missing, we were assured that the tribe wanted to do everything right. They had applied to the US Government for official tribal recognition (so they could open a casino I suggested, though they denied it) and they wanted to be very careful. They would examine my daughter’s genealogy records and get back to her, they said, but we knew they wouldn’t. To admit another member would mean a smaller slice of the casino pie for each of them. We knew they would go back to smoking, playing cards and making excuses. My daughter eventually gave up.

The Indians as victims rhetoric is getting old. I’m tired of hearing it and, judging from last week’s vote, the reservoir of white guilt in the rest of Maine is running out too. The day after the vote though, I heard someone read the result and lament their plight, saying: “Well, we took all their land.” I responded that I didn’t know what he might have done, but I didn’t take land from anyone. Whatever happened more than a hundred years ago is history. No white people alive today took land away from Indians. None of their fathers or grandfathers did either. It’s time to move on.

Life is difficult. Of that we can be sure. It’s more difficult for some than others, but nobody really escapes. We’re dealt a hand in life and we have to play it out. Whining about our cards doesn’t get us anywhere. As long as we have equal opportunity to play them out, how we do it is up to each of us as individuals. We have nobody but ourselves to blame for what we do. We should help each other along the way as much as we can, but we must realize that we can’t help people who aren’t willing to do the work necessary to help themselves.

According the November 8th Press Herald article by Josie Huang:

There are plans to build a liquefied natural gas terminal in Passamaquoddy Bay, and strong interest in harnessing tidal waters and the wind for energy production ventures. But the tribe has focused for nearly 15 years on getting a gambling facility, and the latest setback only reinforced nagging suspicions that voters were discriminating against the tribe . . .

Same old - same old. The energy projects sound too much like work. Much easier to let some out-of-state outfit come in and build a casino in the Indians’ name so tribe members can sit back, collect the revenues and whine about what victims they are.

Vouchers Please

It’s my misfortune to have been a public school teacher during more than three decades when public education has been in decline. The reasons are too voluminous to account for here, but I’ll point out two: increased power of teachers’ unions and increased intervention by big government.

The teachers’ unions make it so expensive to get rid of bad teacher that administrators usually just try to just work around them. One report claims it costs an average of $200,000 in legal fees to fire someone if the union contests it. How can a principal build an effective team if (s)he can’t get rid of deadwood? Under most contracts, the only easy way to get rid of a teacher is through the RIF process - Reduction In Force. If a budget is cut or if student enrollment declines, teachers can be laid off, but administrators still don’t have the option of laying off dysfunctional teachers. It has to be “last hired, first fired.”

Then the federal government enters the picture and mandates that local districts spend more and more on students who don’t function well. Trouble is, many slow learners for whom this spending was originally intended over thirty years ago are being dropped from services. They get help in their early grades, but then they’re tested again in middle school and even though they’re still struggling, regulations say they’re operating at the level they’re capable of and they’re declared ineligible for services. Meanwhile, students who are quite capable but who won’t function for whatever reason, receive most of the help. They get an increasing share of services while many slow learners are cut loose to fend for themselves. Regular classroom teachers are expected to tailor their curricula to slow learners who have been reclassified as “low normal.” At the same time, they must put up with the presence of the others who can work but won’t and they must try to keep bright, motivated students interested - all in the same room at the same time. Educational “experts” insist this can be done if teachers receive training in “differentiation.” One result of this is the grade inflation prevalent at nearly every level of education.

As in so many other social programs since the 1960s, millions and millions of our tax dollars are spent to subsidize dysfunction in public education. Why should we be surprised when it increases? Such students learn that the less they do for themselves, the more someone will step in and do it for them. It’s called “learned helplessness” and it has a pronounced effect on the atmosphere of a class. Such kids do nearly nothing for themselves because they’ve learned that there are essentially no consequences for drifting along. They’re passed along year after year. Few ever stay back anymore because the “progressive” experts insist it does them no good. And, they insist that students be grouped heterogeneously - that is, the functional ones are in the same classes as the dysfunctional ones. This way, a whole class is held back rather than just the students who refuse to learn. This condition is most pronounced in middle school, because in high school students may choose advanced courses after the first year and the many dysfunctional students drop out along the way. The “experts” are afraid of grouping students according to their ability and their willingness to do the work necessary to learn, because bright, motivated students would progress so much that the gap between the functional and dysfunctional would become a chasm and attract scrutiny.

The teachers’ unions are the biggest constituents of the Democrat Party and major donors as well. With their pronounced leftist bias, they push the party to port and are largely responsible for bringing Planned Parenthood sex education programs and homosexual activists into public schools with all the accompanying propaganda. Students down to kindergarten level are exposed to it. What’s going on at Portland, Maine’s King Middle School lately - prescribing birth control to middle schoolers is a good example of how far that envelope is being pushed.

Whatever money is left over in teachers’ union coffers after contributing to Democrat candidates is used to fight voucher initiatives in whatever city or state they might arise. The unions know that if low and middle income parents had a choice about where to send their children to school, it wouldn’t be the local public school for many. With the choices vouchers would offer, the enormous political power of the teachers union monopoly would be smashed and public schools would have to compete for students. Unions insist that voucher initiatives would “take money away from public schools,” but one wonders what kind of fuzzy math they use to make those calculations. It costs an average of over $10,000 per year for each student in public schools. Voucher initiatives which the unions have defeated over and over call for less than half that amount to be spent for students to go to private schools. Parents would kick in the rest. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that vouchers would leave more money for public schools, not less.

In spite of all this, my career has provided much reward because I’ve had the freedom to deliver my curriculum the best way I can and it’s been my privilege to work with almost three thousand Maine children, most of them terrific kids. Also, I know that although union power is at its greatest right now, cracks are beginning to form. Utah's legislature approved a voucher initiative and it was signed by the governor. Teachers' unions pushed through a petition forcing a referendum, outspent the proponents, and defeated it at the polls yesterday. New York City is considering one too. Eventually it's going to happen somehere and then spread, but probably not until after I retire.

Defining Deviancy Down

Have we had enough? It’s beginning to look that way. The final straw? Maybe. Kids, 11-13, can now get birth control pills at Portland’s King Middle School, possibly without their parents’ knowledge. Boys’ voices haven’t changed yet but the school gives them condoms. Five students told the nurse they were sexually active and she decided that the school should prescribe them birth control. The School Committee in that bluest city of the very blue state of Maine agreed with a 7-2 vote. According to the Portland Press Herald: “Of 134 students who visited King's health center during the 2006-07 school year, five students, or 4 percent, reported having sexual intercourse, said Amanda Rowe, lead nurse in Portland's school health centers. ‘This is a service that is totally needed,’ Rowe said. ‘It’s about very few kids, but they are kids who don’t have the same opportunities and access as other students.’”

Opportunities? What is she talking about? She wants to offer them opportunities to behave irresponsibly and avoid some of the consequences? What will she offer next? A taxi service to Planned Parenthood’s Abortion Clinic? Or, is she offering the rest of us an opportunity to keep our blinders on, to avoid taking a hard look at how low our culture has sunk? Students need parental permission to take Tylenol, but not to take strong hormonal birth control pills or injections - or even to get an abortion. Parents of school kids might object if they knew their unborn grandchildren were going to be killed. Better that they never know there was a pregnancy. What they don’t know won’t hurt them.

The blue “progressives” who rule this state believe we must catch up to Canada and Europe with their enlightened permissiveness and socialized medicine. They agree with Hillary Clinton that It Takes A Village to raise a child and parents sometimes get in the way. Some mothers and fathers here in Maine don’t believe the varied versions of sexuality so popular in Portland are wonderful things. They still think a lot of them are just plain wrong and they don’t want parades to celebrate them. So it becomes necessary for Hillary Clinton’s Village People to go around bigoted parents and use schools to influence their kids “progressively” - make students more like those sophisticated Europeans. It’s for the children.

When the story broke, Maine’s Christian Civic League (CCL) demanded that state Attorney General Stephen Rowe investigate Portland’s school-based health clinics for not reporting underage sexual activity as Maine state law requires. That was awkward, because Rowe is married to Amanda Rowe, the lead nurse who wants to pass out the birth control. Cumberland County District Attorney Stephanie Anderson did investigate, however, and determined that the CCL was right - sexual activity by thirteen-year-olds violates Maine law and has to be reported. According to the Press Herald:

Although Portland officials intend to comply with the law, exactly what the law requires remains unclear, [Portland City Attorney Gary] Wood said. Having sex with a 13-year-old is clearly illegal, he said, but the law doesn't address the possibility of the other person involved being 13 years old, too. "I think (Anderson) has raised a legitimate point," Wood said. "I'm just not sure that consensual sexual activity (between two 13-year-olds) constitutes abuse." If Anderson's office received a report of two 13-year-olds having sex, she said, each minor would be considered a victim and a perpetrator and the case likely wouldn't be prosecuted. Wood said he plans to seek guidance from Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe.”

Around and around it goes. Where the buck stops, nobody knows - not in Portland anyway. Maybe the Village People there can look to those sophisticated Europeans for guidance about what to do next. An Oslo, Norway paper reported last week that:

Norwegians woke up Tuesday morning to news that a respected Oslo pre-school teacher, backed by child psychologists, thinks children should be allowed to openly express their own sexuality, not least through sex play and games in the local day care centers known as barnehager, or kindergartens. . . . Pia Friis, leader of the popular Bjerkealleen Barnehage in Oslo and a well-known pre-school educator, told newspaper Dagbladet on Tuesday that children should be allowed to express their own sexuality at day care centers. She doesn't want to stifle what comes naturally. Children, she said, should be able "to look at each other and examine each other's bodies. They can play doctor, play mother and father, dance naked and masturbate.”

I wish I were making all this up but, sadly, I’m not. It’s outrageous of course, but so was the idea of “marriage” between two men or two women only ten years ago. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said four decades ago, we’re “defining deviancy down.” How low can we go? There’s evidence that we may finally be nearing bottom. In Norway, there’s a backlash to the idea of naked, masturbating kindergarteners similar to the backlash Portland’s Village People are feeling about their idea of birth control for eleven-year-olds. Have people finally had enough? Maybe. About time, huh?

Survey Said . . .

“The Portland School Committee voted last night to give birth control pills to middle schoolers,” I told the class, holding up a copy of the Portland Press Herald. Several students were quick to tell me and each other that they had seen the story on the news. “Okay! one person speak at a time! Please!” I said over the din. “Raise your hand if you have something to say. Can one of you sum this up?”

A girl down back said, “Kids at the King Middle School will be able to get birth control pills if their parents give permission, but they won’t necessarily know about it.” Others were holding up their hands enthusiastically, waiting for me to call on them.

“That sounds contradictory,” I said. “Parents give permission, but they might not know about their kid getting birth control pills?”

“It’s confusing,” she said, “but parents give permission for their child to go to the health clinic for something else. Then the nurse, or whoever, might give them birth control and the parents won’t know. There’s a confidentiality thing going on with the kid and the nurse.”

“I get it,” I said.

“Why would sixth graders need birth control, Mr. McLaughlin?” asked a boy.

“Good question,” I answered. “It says here in the sidebar that: ‘The percentage of middle school students in Maine who reported having sexual intercourse dropped from 23 percent in 1997 to 13 percent in 2005, according to the Maine Youth Risk Behavior Survey.’ Now you guys filled out that survey in 2005 when you were in sixth grade,” I continued, “and you can see that the results from it are being used here to justify the school committee’s decision. Do you think the surveys are accurate?”

They looked at each other for a second, seemingly perplexed. “Oh yeah,” said a girl. “I remember that.” Several others nodded as they recalled the survey too.

“The survey indicated that, back in 1997 when you were only three years old, about one out of four middle schoolers were having sex,” I continued. “So, of course you were too young to know if that’s accurate or not. But you were eleven when you filled out the survey in 2005 and those results indicated that one in eight middle schoolers were having sex. Those are your answers and the answers from other kids around the state that are being used here. Does that one-out-of-eight statistic sound right to you?”

“You can’t go by what kids wrote on those,” said a boy. Most other students also voiced skepticism. A dozen side conversations sprang up.

“Okay,! Okay!” I said, trying to bring them all back. “Why not?”

“Nobody’s going to tell the truth on those,” someone said.

“Why not?” I asked again. They all wanted to talk at once. “One at a time!” I said again. Raise your hands!”

“First of all,” said a girl, “kids would be afraid the teacher would know what they wrote.”

“But they were supposed to be anonymous,” I said. “You didn’t put your name on them.”

“But teachers would know what your handwriting looked like and they could find out,” she said.

“Or they’d get the results back from the state saying there were X number of kids at Molly Ockett Middle School having sex, and the teacher could probably figure out who those kids were,” said another student. “They sort of suspect already.”

“Or they’d be afraid the kid sitting beside them would see what they wrote,” said another.

“I see,” I said. “So, were the results under-reporting sexual activity among middle school kids? Over-reporting it? Or were they just unreliable?” I asked them.

“Well,” said a boy, “Boys would probably put that they were having sex more than they really were, and girls would probably put that they were having it less. That’s the way it is.”

“I see. So would they balance each other out?”

“It’s all unreliable,” said a girl. “They shouldn’t go by what was on those surveys.”

“I think kids would be more tempted to have sex if the school passed out birth control pills,” said a boy.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because it’s like the school is saying it’s okay when they give students pills for it.”

I posed the question to several classes. Did they think middle school students were more likely to have sex if they got pills from the school? Overwhelmingly, they did think so. There were two or three in each group who didn’t, saying that kids who decided to have sex were going to do it anyway, no matter what the school did.

“This story is getting a lot of attention across the country,” I told them. “We haven’t heard the last on it. Keep watching the news, okay?”

Degree of Value?

Know any young people with college degrees working in restaurants, retail stores, or somewhere else for which their degree is worthless? Do they owe tens of thousands in student loans? There are lots of them out there. Perhaps they are reevaluating the worth of a college education. I’m not talking about people who want to be engineers, nurses, biologists, or something else in the hard sciences. I’m talking about some of the the so-called “soft sciences” like Women’s Studies or Art History, or some other useless course of study. Only people with huge trust funds should pursue these majors.

A man who graduated from the University of Iowa in the early forties told me three weeks of summer work could pay for a year’s tuition there at the time. I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in the Massachusetts State College system in the sixties and seventies by paying my own way throughout - no loans, no parental assistance, no financial aid of any kind. I just worked. I wanted to be a teacher and I needed at least one degree for that. My courses of study didn’t actually prepare me for the classroom, but they did get me certified. Can young people do that today? It would be much more difficult, if not impossible.

The cost of college has risen faster than nearly everything else while the quality has declined drastically. Government is contributing more and more for “higher education” and getting less and less. The federal government has $448 billion out there in student loans and put out $74 billion in new aid for the 2004/5 school year alone. Are we getting better citizens with all that investment? Doesn’t look like it. According to an April, 2007 article in The Eagle Forum:

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute contracted with the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy to undertake the largest statistically valid survey ever conducted in order to find out what colleges and universities are teaching their students about U.S. history and institutions. They surveyed 14,000 randomly selected college freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. The students were tested with 60 multiple-choice questions to measure their knowledge in four subject areas: American history, American government, America and the world, and the market economy. Freshmen and seniors were given the same test, and here are the results. Seniors scored only 1.5 percent higher, on average, than freshmen, and at 16 schools, seniors scored lower than freshmen.

So, what are we getting for our investment? Looks like less for more. Which are the institutions where seniors know less than freshmen? They’re some of our “prestigious” universities like Yale, Brown, and Georgetown with tuitions nearing $40,000 per year. It’s not just tax money being wasted either. The big foundations like the Ford, Carnegie, Mott, Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations have invested tens of millions in Women’s Studies, African-American Studies as well as Gay and Lesbian Studies. What can a person with a degree in one of those majors do? Teach Women’s, African American, or Gay and Lesbian Studies courses, I guess. Nothing else comes to mind. According to a 1996 City Journal article by Heather MacDonald:

Not content with setting up separate departments of ethnic and gender studies, foundations have poured money into a powerful movement called “curriculum transformation,” which seeks to inject race, gender, and sexual consciousness into every department and discipline. A class in biology, for example, might consider feminine ways of analyzing cellular metabolism; a course in music history might study the hidden misogyny in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—actual examples. One accomplishment of the curricular transformationists is to distinguish bad, “masculine” forms of thinking (logic, mathematics, scientific research) from good, “feminine” forms, which subordinate the search for right answers to “inclusiveness” and “wholeness.”

Uh-huh. You can’t make this stuff up. Do you wonder what Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller would have say about how their money is being spent? Clearly, our colleges and universities suffer from a problem of too much money rather than not enough. Our young people will probably be able to live normal lives without searching for the “right” answers to “inclusiveness” and “wholeness,” much less incurring huge debt to do so. I know I have.

Prestigious University?

Am I the only one who is tired of hearing Columbia referred to as “prestigious”? I mean, what have they done lately? They used to employ and graduate talented people who went on to do great things for their country in various fields, but the institution hasn’t had much to brag about for a while and Columbia might more rightly be called a formerly-prestigious university. As we all know, they invited a racist, terrorist dictator, who is perhaps the biggest enemy of the United States, to speak there. The United Nations had to let him come, but Columbia chose to invite him. Is that what prestigious universities do? Not in my opinion, and it’s part of a decades-long pattern.

When criticism arose about the terrorist Ahmadinejad’s invitation, Lee Bollinger fell back on the “freedom of speech” excuse, as if that would explain his school’s latest quasi-treasonous action. Does Bollinger remember who preserves Columbia’s freedom of speech? Soldiers, that’s who, but Columbia won’t allow ROTC on his “prestigious” campus. He allows military recruiters at the law school only because the US Supreme Court upheld the Solomon Amendment recently and Columbia would lose federal funds if he continued to ban them. Even though students voted nearly 2-1 to ease restrictions on ROTC following the September 11th attacks, the administration still refuses to allow it. Columbia’s faculty and administration claim our government discriminates with its “Don’t ask; don’t tell” policy toward homosexuals in the military. Columbia claims to ban all forms of discrimination - unless it’s against patriotic Americans. That kind of discrimination is encouraged, nurtured even. Are the “adults” there to the left of students now? Seems like it.

In 2003, an assistant professor named Nicholas De Genova called for the death of American soldiers in Iraq, saying: "Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live--a world where the U.S. would have no place. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus." To those who considered such statements treasonous, President Lee Bollinger fell back on his usual explanation: "Assistant Professor Nicholas De Genova was speaking as an individual at a teach-in. He was exercising his right to free speech. His statement does not in any way represent the views of Columbia University,” he said.

Is that right, Mr. Bollinger? Then why does your university hire people like that? Why do you promote them? Until his recent death, Edward Said was a university professor - the highest rank for a professor at Columbia. Said believed that Yassir Arafat - the father of modern terrorism - was not aggressive enough toward Israel. Hijackings, murders, assassinations and suicide bombers are too gentle for Professor Said. “The stones and slings of young men [of the Palestinian Intifada] are now offering courageous resistance to a demeaning fate meted to them by Israeli soldiers armed by the United States, policed by Arafat's apparatus with U.S. military and financial aid," Said wrote. The Columbia professor was actually caught on film joining in the stone-throwing himself. His Palestinian allies were also filmed as they danced in the streets after hearing of the September 11th attack.

The Ahmadinejad fiasco is only the latest in a series of anti-American outrages at Columbia going back to 1968 when they let radical leftist students occupy their administration building for eight days so the media could fawn over them and their anti-war views. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough once asked a guest, Daniel Pipes, Director of the Middle East Forum, this question: “What's wrong with Columbia University where they let somebody like Said teach there and they celebrate his teachings and they also allow another professor to root against America in their war in Iraq?”

“They're too superior to feel patriotism for the United States,” Pipes answered. “These are internationalists who look at the world from, you know, a kind of lunar position, you know, far away, no allegiances. They feel genuinely distant from the United States. They don't like this country very much.”

Sounds like the kind of “unbiased” perspective we see in many of our mainstream media personalities. It’s not fashionable to wear American flag lapel pins or say “our” troops when reporting the War with Radical Islam. It makes me wonder how many of them are graduates of the Columbia School of Journalism. After studying curricula in which courses in western civilization have been dropped in favor of others purporting that heterosexual, capitalist, white men are responsible for most of the world’s problems, we shouldn’t wonder why they turn out that way.

They’ve been called prestigious so often that many who teach at Columbia, with its $6 billion endowment and $37,000 per year tuition rate, believe themselves way above other Americans who love their country and are willing to fight and die for it. It’s past time that Columbia be disabused of its pompous notions.

The Fair: Like It Or Not

Everybody knows when it’s Fryeburg Fair week. You can’t live in western Maine with being affected. Everyone’s routine changes because, even if you never go to the fair, you have to plan on leaving earlier to get someplace if you’re going anywhere near Fryeburg village. A week earlier, all the highways leading into western Maine are filled with unusual-looking vehicles carrying fried dough stands and carnival rides. Seeing all this strange-looking cargo, school kids get keyed up and by the time the fair opens, they’re wired. Some work there, especially if their parents run a small business and depend on the income they earn in a booth during that frenetic week. Some park cars for property-owners near the fairgrounds. Others just go and hang out there every day. Whatever their reasons, a lot of school kids are tired or wired, or both. Others are just absent.

When my children were young, I took them to the fair. Money was tight in those days and I had to say no to them often. If I had to pay at the entrance I don’t think I could have afforded it, but I usually knew someone who worked there and would let us in free. I couldn’t pay for them to go on the rides until the last night when bracelets were sold for about $5 or $10 apiece, allowing them to ride them all until closing time. I’d buy a bracelet for myself too and we’d all be pretty tired when we got home. By the time my kids were teenagers, however, they wouldn’t want to be seen with parents in a public place like that, so my duty was to drop them off and pick them up. Once they got old enough to drive themselves to the fair, I stopped going altogether.

There’s one thing at the Fryeburg Fair I’ve never seen, however, and would really like to, and that’s Woodsman’s Day. For about twenty-five years, I cut wood from my family’s wood lot in West Lovell and from my own property here on Christian Hill. I’d work up at least seven or eight cords every year until my life got so busy with other jobs that I heat with oil now. Back in those days I was interested in tractors and chain saws and trucks and I wanted to watch the guys who were really good at it show off their skills. Woodsman’s Day is held on the Monday of fair week when school is in session. I couldn’t call in sick and show up at the fair because too many people knew me. Guess I’ll have to wait until I retire from teaching before I can finally go.

When my own and the area kids went off to college and it wasn’t too far away, their first visit back home was usually during the long Columbus Day weekend - which was also fair week. It became almost obligatory for the new freshmen to flash their faces and meet old friends at the Fryeburg Fair. After a few more years, grandchildren started coming along. My first grandson wasn’t quite a year old when his mother and his two aunts wanted to be present for his first fair experience as he was pushed around in a stroller. It became a rite of passage to watch the first member of the newest generation to experience his first Fryeburg Fair. He’ll never remember it of course, but my daughters will, and we have the pictures.

Though I hadn’t attended for five years or so, I returned to the fair this year with my now seven-year-old grandson. It was fun to follow a boy his age around the grounds and see it all through his eyes. Though my legs got tired faster than his did, his enthusiasm was a balm for this late-middle-aged columnist as we checked out rides, gaming booths, food stands, animal barns, and grown-up toys like ATVs, snowmobiles and trucks. What he seemed to like most was the sheep dog competition.

Fairs have a long history going back several centuries - to middle-age Europe at least where they were important social, political and economic events. In Old England, fairs were commissioned by the king and lots of wealth changed hands just as it does today. Our local fair shows no signs of waning early in the twenty-first century either. Like it or not, we’re all going to have to enjoy it or endure it every year for the foreseeable future.