Living in the Future

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The real reason, whether they want to admit it or not, that we’re discussing the fiscal cliff is because people make plans based on the future rather than on the present. A few years ago, I remember the Department Chair coming in and telling me that they were cutting back and that I was on the list of layoffs because I was not vested. “I hope you weren’t counting on that money continuing to come in,” he somewhat inarticulately told me. “No sir, “ I replied, “I only rely on the money that’s already in my account.” Unfortunately, far too many people project their current status indefinitely into the future and spend money they do not yet and may never have. Even worse, almost all of our elected officials are that kind of people.

In essence, we try to borrow money from our future selves. This fiduciary flaw propelled title loan and payday loan and similar companies not only to survive but to expand, as we enjoy now and pay later, hoping that when the bill comes due we’ll have the money to pay for it. Problem is that we continue to spend money between now and then rather than saving it. A friend of mine said the other day that it’s better to sock it away in savings, prepaying yourself in monthly installments so that you can pay in cash. At least that way, although you may have to wait, you don’t have to pay a whole lot more than it’s actually worth and you know you can afford it.

One chief cause for failure and unhappiness in this world is trading what we want most for what we want in the moment. Concomitantly, one key to success is to practice some delayed gratification. You see, eventually, in making withdrawals from future earnings, you find that there is not enough money to pay back those loans let alone purchase things that you need when the future and present merge. Your needs and wants and interests will change at least somewhat over time, and that thing you absolutely must have now will seem very petty in the future, when you realize you traded 48 hours of your life for an electronic gizmo that you destroyed because you sat on it incorrectly.

Ironically enough, this is how politicians create so-called surpluses. They project spending and earnings into the future, without regard for changing circumstances or turnover of Congress, and talk about what “might have been”. Who can say what might have been? Yet, they are prophets about everything that paints them in a good light, and any naysayers are negative Nellies or right-wing radicals. The only real surplus is when, after all the checks come in and all the bills go out, you have money left over before the next fiscal year begins. Surpluses do not last longer than that.

Today’s financial duress comes because long ago, people distal to us in space and in time decided to borrow from us to pay for their whims. Tomorrow, the Congress may repeat that mistake and double down on all of these pyramid schemes and borrow from our children and theirs. Eventually, someone must pay the piper, and it would be arrogant and foolish of us to assume that we will not be the generation to which the bill comes due. We have serious challenges today, and it would behoove us all to follow the Chair’s advice and not count on continuation of cash flow. Who knows what might happen between now and then? Fiscal futures are risky business, and when I want to know about them I don't ask lawyers for solutions. You want solutions? Ask a (bio)chemist.

When you focus on the problem, sometimes it's hard to clearly see the solutions. I am not in the business of problems. I came to make solutions.

Run on Our Guns

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A friend of mine reported absolute pandemonium from the gun show today. People waited hours in line to get in, spent hours on the phone for background checks, and overpaid by at least 50% for substandard merchandise on fear of Feinstein’s gun ban. Much of the sentiment was repeated from person to person, but it wasn’t about any kind of apocalypse. The people were afraid of their government. People should never be afraid of their governments.

I think this is an artificial run on guns. If I were Feinstein, I would have had my rich husband buy up a bunch of gun stock, announced the ban, and then raked in the dough as thousands of desperate citizens voluntarily handed over their money in a panic. What I think will happen is that this will die down and then it will happen again in a few years. That will allow the elites to make far more money off us than it will to put us under tyranny. Why steal from us when they can set up a situation in which we voluntarily hand them our money? If you’re going to buy something now, buy bullets, otherwise you might as well go out and buy a big wrench, because guns are only a tool by which to propel bullets, without which they are only good as a truncheon.

When Obama bans guns, if he does, he will do so suddenly and without warning. There will not be a bill out of Congress. He has shown thus far great disdain for the fact that Congress “interferes” with his plans, so I expect him to sign an executive order and skip Congress entirely. He views the Constitution as an impediment.

People are afraid of this government. They are talking riot and insurrection, which are unbecoming of citizens whose rights are still even marginally protected. Some Americans forget that the talks with King George lasted for over a decade before the states reluctantly revolted, even after blood had several times been shed by the British. Last I checked, the government hasn’t been killing citizens let alone locking them up. Our answer is to resist evil with whatever other means remain to us before we result to any kind of weapon besides words. While the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words shall always retain power, and with enough people behind them the right words can change the world- We the People. Remember that this government also fears us.

I have heard all week people who are in positions of power talk about how the ban will not actually go into effect. Mostly, I suspect Feinstein did this to appeal to her base. Many Democrats equate action with accomplishment, that if the government is doing something it has achieved something, no matter how nonsensical that notion may be. On the other hand, I will not be surprised to discover if it ever comes to light that Feinstein made a ton of money creating a run on guns. What politicians threaten to do carries a great deal of weight, so sometimes all they must do is feint in order to get the reaction they like, and then they can back off and seem reasonable as they line their pockets when they are the least reasonable among us.

If I'm wrong, I will eat my words. They have done this before. I know it seems dire. If it mattered that much to you, then why didn't you throw the incumbents out of office and turn over the government to the GOP? You get the government you deserve, and Republics turn to despotism when the people are incapable of governance by any other. If you really want to do something about it now, repent, and secure the protection and inspiration of the Almighty to tell you where to go, what to do, when to go and how to act. Only He will chart you a course that ultimately leads to a land of promise. No politician ever has managed what God promises us. He is the strength of my arm and my arms. I will buy tickets to His gun show...

Here is Our Answer

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I watched last night the Mel Ferrer/James Garner adaptation of Sabatini's "Scaramouche" and found an unexpected link to the events of the last week. When I saw that Congressman Sheila Jackson Lee thinks the best response to Sandy Hook is to turn in your guns, I had a memory flashback that I will now make public. I have been, as was the Marquis De Maisne in aforementioned film, challenged as respects my rights. Others are calling for the murder of gun owners (paradox anyone?). With all due respect, the Congressman can bite my shorts.

In the film, the Marquis informs Scaramouche/Andre Moirot that he will defend his rights with his sword. Of course, they didn't have as many guns back then, and as a gentleman, the Marquis would not have used one in most circumstances. It reminds me of when, while working for Wal-Mart, an associate suggested my life should be forfeit because of my religious affiliation. He stood, that member of the warehouse administration, and suggested that every member of my Faith should be put to death. I looked at the head of HR and a handful of others who I knew were members of my Faith in positions of responsibility in their respective congregations. They turned away, hoping to hide their Faith. The speaker went on to talk about how they should send out killing teams two by two like we send out men to proselyte, not to save our souls but to slay our bodies. Nobody acted, and so I stood up, and said, to my everlasting conviction, "You are welcome to come to my house any time. I will introduce you to my two friends- Smith and Wesson." The room emptied. To this day, nobody at that Wal-Mart warehouse has ever said anything to me about my faith or my life being forfeit.

The Sandy Hook disaster is bad. The Obama administration insists on using it as part of a campaign to strip away our rights. They have talked for days about how we don't "need an assault rifle"; but it's not a Bill of Needs. They have used it as a platform for campaigning, for politics, and for self-aggrandizement. The bodies of the dead were still lying in the school in their gore as Gore and Helgenberg and Feinstein and Reid joined the chorus with Obama trying to take away our guns. Some of those people are, like another recent anti-gun Democrat, hypocrites who carried guns. They think nothing of denying us the right to carry weapons with which to defend ourselves whilst they are surrounded at all times by armed guards. They fear us. That's a good thing.

If ever our rights are threatened, here is our answer. It is not sedition or rebellion or revolution. It is in the Declaration. "When a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them to absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and establish new safeguards for their future security, laying its foundations in such principles and organizing its structure in such form as shall seem to them most likely to affect their safety and happiness." Consequently, I am petitioning the governor for permission to organize a company of Militia as per NRS 412:026 in the State of Nevada so that when they come for my guns I can say, "I am militia" and deny them any right. Militia weapons always belonged to the militia member, and I will use every cent I have to fight them in court before I let them take the guns I own.

Their campaign against guns betrays their ignorance. They do not even know what an assault weapon is. Feinstein's original ban was done by looking through pictures for guns that looked menacing. They ignore that these kinds of things happen all the time, but that the worst among them do not involve guns- 1926 bombing and 2012 massive stabbing in China. They do not know why we carry guns. They have not read Clayton Cramer's books. I have. Their ignorance of history also shows that they think we are saps who do not know that disarming the public leads to suppression or that in the wake of Hurricane Sandy (interesting- hurricane and shooting with similar names...) people in New York, where it is illegal to own a gun, took up baseball bats, hockey sticks, and the like to defend themselves because the police were absent. Furthermore, criminals disregard the law, so criminals will always find guns. IN fact, China partnered with Venezuela to start making AK47s in OUR OWN HEMISPHERE just this week. The laws just tell criminals where to strike, where they can count on the least resistance. If gun control really worked, why did Fort Hood happen? Military installations have the highest security anywhere, but let's not talk about that because it might offend a Muslim. Nobody worries about upsetting a Mormon because we don't blow up people when we don't get our way.

Whenever our rights are threatened, here is our answer: LIBERTY. It is in the strength of our arm, our arms, where, however weak we may be, together we are many. Obama is unifying us all right, against government. He would do well to remember the Men of '76 and that, when the government comes for our shot and our powder, Patriots will meet them on the Green.

Choose Your Own Adventure

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The worth of a soul is great in the sight of God. That’s what motivates my individual effort on behalf of the people with whom I interact. Now, if I’m doing more than half the work, it’s not help, so I’m not a pushover, but I have friends who can testify that when they needed something they could call on me. You see, I have learned that the most important things in our life are not things- they are people. Particularly this time of year, just like Charlie Brown reminds us, Christmas is all about the people who mean something in our lives.

While we talk about those who mean something to us, the world at large continues its campaign to cheapen the individual. They talk about people as numbers rather than names, as groups rather than individuals, by their vocations rather than their contributions. You see, whenever we need help, helicopters don’t fly themselves, dollars don’t magically fly into our accounts, and books don’t explain themselves to us. All of those inanimate objects are made useful because they are put to use by people in a positive way.

Rather than consider that you are worthy because of what you can do, some people try to measure your worth based on what you can help other parts of society do. As a teacher, I find myself measured frequently according to that very criterion, but when I floss my teeth, I do not think about the roads, bridges, or people who have nothing to do with floss. I think of Levi Parmly who popularized it as a way to clean out teeth. He wasn’t helped by a road or bridge, and maybe his friends actually got in his way or tried to dissuade him, and if so his individual worth has nothing to do with collective worth. They like to talk about how individual salvation is tied to collective salvation; ask them who must sacrifice to pay for Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler, and they don’t have an answer. They ignore those people.

While the world measures us by what we accomplish they simultaneously dissuade us from trying to accomplish anything. They rack and stack us according to our job titles, our cars, the neighborhoods in which we live, the clothes we wear, and many other outward signs. Then they resent us for our success and think we should give that to other people who have not done anything special except to exist, nevermind how many of them are “accidents”. By telling someone that they are owed something for no other reason than that they exist, you in essence cheapen work and alter the way in which we measure a thing’s value. Their class warfare arguments exist to balkanize us so that we will turn to them, so they can play the part of the impartial third party while they suck both sides dry. I guess that’s why so many of our leaders are lawyers, because they seem to learn that more thoroughly than any other profession.

Rather than recognize the fact that you can do great things, they measure our worth based on a comparison basis. CS Lewis warned of how this is related to pride, pointing out that “It is comparison that makes us proud, the pleasure of appearing to be the best. So many of the measurements are set up on a sliding scale that reflects our insecurities, from the number of women we have conquered to the brand of our car, and instead of thinking about what we share as people, we think about how we stack up compared to people we do not know or like.

When we get right down to it, there is only one you. You need not go out of your way trying to be unique. Be you; do what you do. There are things for you to do that nobody else can do as well as you, and because of that, you are of great worth. Tolkien taught us that even the smallest person can change the world, and in the lives of the people you know, you may change their world. You built that, and even if it is small, it exists, and that means it mattered to someone somehow. In many ways, life is really like those old choose your own adventure stories. Sometimes we choose paths we do not like, and sometimes we can go back and try something else, but in everyone's life there are both challenges and triumphs. In the end, there is a way that leads to a good ending, and perhaps even better or best. You have to turn the pages, choose to which page you will turn, and then decide what to do when you get there. Nobody can do that for you. That choice is up to you. Yes, your worth can be great, and what you become is mostly up to you.

To Save ALL Men

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Like many of you, I am saddened by today’s shooting massacre in Connecticut. President Obama will probably say it’s a time for “introspection”, and I agree with him although not for the same reasons. He will talk about, like he did at the time of the last domestic shooting, how we need to consider how we are at fault, about these children, or about how if he had a son it would look like Trayvon. I think it’s a time to consider based on our reactions where we really are this year as we prepare to make goals in 2013.

So far this morning, I have seen my facebook and twitter feeds awash with violent reactions to the violence. All sorts of disparaging remarks have been made about the shooter, about him getting his due “if there is a hell”, and the like. I think this tells me far more about the people who feel this way than it tells me about the shooter, particularly as more details come out about him. If he really is autistic, has Aspergers, or something else, then I am inclined to pray for him, because he will probably remember this in eternity even though if those details are true it might not be his fault.

We are quick, too quick, sometimes to point out the weaknesses in others. Drawing attention to the mistakes in others does nothing to strengthen yours. All it does is deflect. It comes across as extremely self-righteous, which is perhaps the great plague of our age. We are proud, so proud that we do not pray to God to forgive us but rather pray that He will punish those we do not know or do not like. I think we completely miss the point of Christ if that is our attitude.

All of us have sinned and as such fall short of God's glory. All of us needed the Savior's sacrifice to have any hope for anything except for "death, hell and the devil". Christ came to save ALL men, not just the ones who loved him back. Why else would he forgive the Romans who crucified him with the plea, "for they know not what they do"? In his letter to the Romans, Paul wrote the following warning:

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. --Romans 12:19

The law of the land would have dealt with this man if he were still alive. Now that he is in God’s presence, the matter of his guilt is no matter to us. What remains to us is to make useful work of what remains and take care of those who were hurt physically and emotionally by his actions. Furthermore, Christ has admonished us in latter days what our true responsibility is.

Wherefore, I say unto you, that ye ought to forgive one another; for he that forgiveth not his brother his trespasses standeth condemned before the Lord; for there remaineth in him the greater sin. I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men. –D&C 64:9-10

Years ago, I learned a poem which warns against harboring resentment and anger. Turned inwards, it is an unconquerable enemy capable of damaging us beyond our poor power to repair. The angry can only find peace through Christ. I know that intimately.

As we consider this tragedy, remember there is another tragedy unfolding in the form of our reactions to the choices of another. We ascribe evil adjectives to his motives because we do not know the facts. Even the wise cannot see all ends. I think we do the shooter, the innocent victims, society as a whole, and ourselves most especially a disservice if we deny Christ the power and opportunity to save the shooter from his guilt and error as well as the victims and the survivors from their own. Christ came after all to save ALL men, not just our friends, families, and neighbors. As we celebrate His birth in just over a week, let us remember that, and then the deaths of those poor children will have been wise, because they will have brought us closer to Christ.

"In order to really believe in the power of the atonement, we must all leave room for the possibility that Saul can become Paul." -me

Denying the Christ

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Our modern morality claims that the what is all that matters, without regard for motives, or it just assumes the motives are good. One of the students that works in the gym said that if Hitler gave away enough money to help the suffering she would consider him paid in full for the millions of Jews slaughtered at his order. Contrarily, evidence suggests that for the continuance of civil society that it is evil to believe that what we do matters more than why, that it is possible for a man to redeem his past mistakes on his own.

This is why some people are allowed, at least in the mind of popular opinion, to commit crimes against the civil society and get away with it, because they are philanthropic. Nevermind the degree of their crime or the fact that they draw attention to their good deeds in order to distract us from the evil they do. Contrarily, they disallow some because they do not pay enough to the poor or needy or whatever special interest group they sustain.

Essentially in this diabolic plan, they believe they can save themselves. They believe that you can pay your debt and build up a positive balance. That’s not how it works, even in the legal system. A felon, even after he pays his debt to society, is still regarded and remembered, at least by law enforcement, as a felon for the crimes he committed. This is why men like Bill Clinton and Tim Allen can be forgiven; despite their immoral conduct, they entertain us and do good, and so some choose to regard them as if all things are forgiven.

In essence, these people believe that you can pay for your own sins. They believe that it is possible for a debtor who has no assets, no credibility, and no worth, to pay off his own debts. The sale of indulgences has so inculcated itself into our society, that men now believe it’s simply a matter of making sure your good deeds outweigh the bad ones, and you can buy your way into good graces with gods and men regardless of your motives, regardless of your character, and regardless of the consequences of your past. They believe that we can save ourselves.

What need have these people for a Savior? They would deny Him, not because they deny His existence per se, but because they deny the need for Him, His help, and the fact that all men are lost without Christ. They turn to Mary and Oprah for their exemplars, without recognizing that, however good these people might be, they are still mortals and as such fallen examples. There are no paragons among us. All of us need Christ.

Despite their claims, the self-proclaimed elites among us do not really care about the people. They care about themselves. They think it is possible to exalt themselves. They think an ax can lift itself. They think that a debt can pay itself off, because we have forgotten about debtor’s prisons. Perhaps it’s because we can continue to earn money that we think we can pay a debt and make ourselves as we were before we became felons. Their plight is dire, because they deny Christ, even as He is desperate and ready to help them.

Arrogant to 'The Law'

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Years ago I applied for a job with the Nevada Highway Patrol. The interviewing officer seemed surprised at my answer to why I was an ideal candidate. Normally people talk about their degree in criminal justice or how much they rode along or something of that sort. I told him that I had striven all my life to obey, honor, and sustain the law, and when he asked me to justify why that qualified me, I asked him, “Don’t you want people who follow the law to be the ones who enforce it?” This betrayed my naiveté, and I have since learned that the laws are protections not against others but from ourselves.

On the way to work each morning and in almost every instance where I drive, I see all sorts of violations of the social contract. I pass very few people. In the last week, I have been in two near collisions because the car in front of me suddenly slowed when he saw a policeman. Frequently, cars would pass me and then try to squeeze over in front of me or other people, risking causing collisions. They are too important. They cannot wait. It is very selfish.

I believe this arrogance when it comes to the law is one reason why so many things are wrong in our world. Yesterday, Mark Levin described liberalism as the philosophy of hypocrisy, because we have Tim “Tax Cheat” Geithner and Al “Not So” Sharpton advocating that the rich need to pay more taxes when it is well known that both of those individuals are in violation of tax laws. So many people want government to give them things they have not earned. I think Romney was wrong about the 47% comment. I think he was wrong about the number, and it may be much higher. I have read stories that it costs $168/day per family on welfare, which means that some families on welfare take home more pay than I do because welfare benefits are not taxed. I read another analysis that you can do better on welfare after taxes than being productive. How does that make sense? The law says that you reap what you sow, but some people insist on reaping what I sow.

So many people, particularly in the public sector, are jealous for themselves rather than for society. They may talk of shared sacrifice and collective salvation and skin in the game, but if you look at them, they talk one way and live another. Back during Nevada’s budget crisis, I wrote the governor and told him to trim the fat and lay off people in education, knowing I could lose my job. I have taken since coming to work in my employ an effective 20% cut in pay (it’s officially only 5%, but with increases to our retirement, health care, etc., it rises quickly higher than that). Contrast that with Hostess where some employees refused to take any paycut, resulting in a 100% cut in pay for everyone at the company. You see, unlike some teachers and firemen and police officers, I realize that whereas society can survive without me, I cannot have a job without them. I remind my students every semester that I am there because they are there; without students there is no need for professors.

Our world today is marked by so much selfishness. Some of the voices who cry the loudest for compassion are the most selfish among us. You see, the truly charitable are charitable where nobody can see them or when they think nobody is watching. Sometimes we notice, but often they escape our gaze. It has always been the hypocrites who do things to be seen of men, called out by Jesus because they will disfigure their faces and rend their robes and appear unto men to fast. I remind you of the story of John Weightman who had a dream in which he was surprised to discover that, despite his many charitable deeds in life, because he had taken credit for them his mansion in heaven was rather small. They do so to be puffed up in their chests and to gain favor with men, but as they ignore The Law, they have their reward already, and there is nothing in the fall of mortality for them to harvest.

The law of the harvest says that men reap what they sow. You cannot live poorly and receive good gifts. Santa is not fooled. God is not fooled. You may fool men, but we are the only system in the universe of which I am aware that is allowed to temporarily do useless work. Eventually the scales must be balanced and each must pay for what he has decided to become. I have written often about the difference between doing and being, and Christ taught us that, particularly in this season of ‘gifts’, a man who giveth a gift because he must is treated as if he gave nothing at all. Be giving and forget the gift, forget yourself, and he who loseth his life shall find it. That is what The Law taught us. Wise men follow The Law.

The Godless among us do not like that there is any power higher than their own will. I am surprised they are willing to bow to science, because that acknowledges that there are scientific laws that govern the universe. They want what they want to be what is, and so they publish as “facts” things that substantiate their preconceived notions. Then they do all they can to make people dependent on and looking towards government and the people who serve there, a lot like a woman I once knew in Austria. This they do because it’s about them, not about you. It’s about their egos. Obama doesn't like religion mayhap because in his mind as ‘messiah’ god and government have become one. "I'm Barack Almighty. My will be done!" In my experience, most of the people who reject faith or change congregations do so because they place their will over God's. They openly defy God by ordering Him around the universe and then take offense when He does not obey their commandments. They desire to command God rather than be commanded by Him, and they mostly hurt themselves. They are arrogant to The Law, and I fear for them when the day of judgment comes.

It has been written that he who obeys the laws of God need not fear the laws of man. Those who defy the laws of man are probably not submissive to the laws of God, for God has asked us to honor, obey and sustain the law when it is just and brave and true. For that reason, whenever I hear talk as I did last eve of insurrection and rebellion and secession, I advise them to rethink their passions. I understand their feelings, but they are ignorant of the extent that precipitated the movement of 1776, and we are nowhere near that level of abuse of the laws of Nature and Nature’s God. In the end, they will hurt themselves. Christ came to save the penitent, but if you have no need of a Savior, why would you turn to Him? You cannot save yourself, justify yourself, or cleanse yourself. In the end, the law requires that every man reap what he sows, and only those who partner with Christ have hope for a happy ending.

Emotional Attachment

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Last night, I pointed out to my students as I usually do the paradox of the human condition. Humans are the only species of which I am aware that places the survival of other species over its own, and we are the only species of which I am aware that goes to the lengths to which we go to save the weakest among us. In essence, our choices undermine our very existence, and I’m surprised humans are still alive at all. Perhaps that is also because comparatively to other organisms of which we are aware humans have the highest emotional attachment to other members of our species and the things they do that affect us or others.

What we choose to keep and support runs afoul of our beliefs that the strong survive or that those who survive are those who can adapt. This week, while listening to NPR, I heard on “The World” a reporter who seemed almost ecstatic over the prospect of a resurgence of Nubian music in the Sudan. Months ago, I read about efforts in Europe to change utility construction plans so as to preserve fragments of a Roman Road some 20 feet below the current land surface. This prompted me to think about what we conserve and why and what emotional attachment we put on what we choose to keep.

Our fascination with these things seems based on emotion over reason. Vegetarians oppose the slaughter of animals whose sole purpose is as food on the auspices that they have faces while some of their number think nothing of aborting human fetuses who also have faces. Environmentalists will go to great lengths to prevent development of an area to preserve the kit fox because they are cute until of course the time comes to lay high speed rail through California’s central valley. We spend large sums of money preserving something when it makes far more sense to tear it down and rebuild a modern mockup. It is ok to conserve some things but not others. In short, conservation is good, but conservativism is considered to be contrary to progress. We romanticize conservation of music and art while we disdain conservation of politics and moral culture. We preserve what but not why.

If their argument holds water, then the successful and valuable really is what weathers change well. By that argument anything Roman, Greek, or from the British Empire is absolutely worthless because those societies no longer exist as formerly constituted. If that’s true, then nothing we do has any worth either, because none of us will live forever unless some historian can be coerced into chronicling our contributions, concocted or correctly. Yet, the same people who argue for the preservation of the past do so only partially. They continue to prop up dying species, dying art forms, dying technology, etc., at great public expense while they criticize conservatives for their "blind adherence to an obsolete moral code". They subsidize stuff over substance.

I believe they do this on purpose. They do not like history or Roman culture or plants; they like certain episodes of history, certain facets of Roman culture, and certain plant species, and the rest, which do not happen to corroborate their taste, beliefs, habits, or politics, are considered as dross and refuse and refused the same protections and fiduciary allocations they extend to their pet projects. This is a diabolical duplicity designed to dispirit, deject, and dissuade the impressionable from the good parts of the past in favor of the parts that testify of government power or distract minds from its excesses. You need only look at what they choose to promote and who becomes an acolyte thereof to realize that it’s still about “bread and circuses”. Most of what they conserve takes our minds off of what offenses other people, in particular politicians, propose to enforce among us. They would do well to remember not to gouge something out with the beam in their own eye while drawing attention to the mote in mine.

As my students learned, the continuity of the human race however relies on a conservative process. Every cell in our body recreates itself via semi-conservative replication of organic molecules inside the parent cell, using an existing template as measure for a new product. Semi-conservative replication uses an old template to make something that is proven successful and improve upon it. Consequently, aberrations are slow, rare, and small, so that if they are wrong they are easily recoverable. I believe that is why the Founding Fathers established our Constitutional government, to control the rate of mutation so that the body politic could endure for generations.

Contrarily, the conservationists are often in a hurry. Obama for example strikes me as brash, reckless, and systemic in his "fundamental transformation" which is not how any natural process creates lasting and successful changes. He insisted that if we didn't act then it would be the end of the world as we knew it even as he ended the world as we knew it. In biology, that's referred to as a mutant, which carries both negative connotation and denotation. Scientific attempts to understand and improve are stepwise and deliberate so we can measure the effects and retain only the parts that do the useful work that we desire, actual work, not work we hope will happen as a coincidence.

What we choose to keep and maintain tells people a lot about what we value. Every visitor to my house knows from first glance what I value most. However, why we value those things matters at least as much as what we value. Much of my décor is emotionally-linked to something rather than rational. While conservationists deny that, it betrays their emotion, whereas my open admission that I have emotional attachments may make me the most rational of all.

Masquerading as Truth

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Since I first heard of people pretending to be relief workers or Red Cross employees after hurricane Sandy to today when I looked again at the Viceroy butterfly, I am reminded that things are not always what they seem. People sometimes hastily believe a thing because they desire it to be true or because they are afraid it might be. In truth, it's probably why so little changes- we are afraid that we might not be offered something true or because we believe one person because we don't know or don't like someone who says the opposite.

Years ago, I lost a friend for a while because I told her something she didn't want to hear. She asked me what I thought of her new male companion, hoping that I would tell her the same thing she thought, and when I told her my concerns, she stopped talking to me. This lasted for an entire year, at which point I unexpectedly heard from her. She called to tell me that she was pregnant, and that I was right- he was not what he purported himself to be. You see, she found something in him that may have been true, or that she hoped desperately would prove to be so, and so she latched onto that kernel even though the fruit surrounding it was rotten.

Today on Facebook I was added against my will to a group that celebrates bikini models. As soon as I discovered this, I left the group, not because I don't appreciate a pretty woman, but because their beauty may not be anything more than clever photoshop skills or plastic surgery. I know that Sunday night I caught myself looking at an actress on a show because of her beauty in her mid 40s, and then I saw the scars from her plastic surgery and I knew that it wasn't because of her behavior as much as it came from her wealth. Someone once told me that there are no ugly women, only poor ones, but I think he referred only to external beauty. Perhaps he forgot Odysseus and the Syrens or Perseus and Medusa or that some of nature's greatest predators lure in their victims with scents, colors, and motions. There is a great difference sometimes between what is true and what is made to appear to be truth.

The kingdom of God is likened unto a pearl of great price, which when a man found he went and sold all that he had to buy it. While it is something desirable, it is not the only desirable thing, nor is everything that appears to resemble it the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I have seen gobs of images on the internet of Chinese knockoffs that look like the real thing but are clearly fake. In 2000 I bought a leather jacket where the buttons said "quality since 2002". I had no idea that boutique was supplied by time lords.

I have been saying since I started teaching at the collegiate level that most people are not looking for truth. Most of them secretly hope that the truth will happen to corroborate what they already believe. In my experience, most people who leave Faith or change congregations do so because the teachings do not match their beliefs. Rather than align their will with God's, submitting to His will, and obeying His laws, they attempt to boss Him around the universe and then act all offended when He does not obey their commandments. In any event, it is certainly no mark of maturity to say, "Give me what I want or I will be a miscreant".  Sometimes there are elements of truth, but what they have found appeals only to a certain logic, a certain subset of facts, or a particular point of view. I love this video that illustrates how that can be a fallacy:

It's only when we get the whole picture that we realize what's truly going on, but some people don't wait for the whole picture before marching around with a portion thereof, which may not be the whole truth even if it is true. God isn't finished talking to us when He tells us something true. Science doesn't have all the answers when we discover something that is sufficient to reject the null hypothesis. We have some truth. It might only be true on earth, or in a vacuum, or for woodchucks or if the temperature is 2000K. It might not be true at all in the grand scheme of things.  We call that a false positive.

In our day, there are false pearls, that sound like truth but are really sand or stones or some other pyrite-like distraction from truth. Opinions of men masquerade as truth, and while they may have the appearance of godliness, if they deny the power thereof they will not satisfy or stand the test of time and circumstance. Just because a purse says Prada made it doesn't make that true. I have a beard, but it doesn't make me a Nazarene, a wise man, a miscreant, or a wizard. It gives me a hairy face, but only compared to some. Truth can be relative, but things that are really true are really true always and in all ways. I don't think we have as much truth as we think, but that's probably because we think we have enough. People only usually find things they seek, and if you already think you have it, you stop looking.  We receive not because we ask not, and in our vanity, we think we are learned and wise when in reality we are otherwise. It's part of why I hate being a professor- sometimes I feel like I profess things I don't really know. My mentor in Graduate School told me that "an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing at all". At least I'm wise enough to realize how little I really know.

Trading Your Life

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Rarely do I look forward to the release of a film. However, a few years ago when "In Time" came out, I wanted to see it, not because I knew it would be great, but because I was curious how they would handle it. You see, for a long time, I have looked at purchases in terms of how much time I had to trade for it. Is it worth the time? If you had to trade, would you trade that amount of your life? The movie begs some fascinating think pieces that made it worth seeing. I will address a few here.

You get one year free, and if you want more time, you have to do something valuable enough that those who have time will give you theirs. Near the beginning of the movie, they show the price of coffee rising to 5 minutes for a cup. Do the math. I calculated that to cost me $1.67, which is pretty expensive unless the coffee is starbucks, but it's just some crappy cup of coffee. Riding the bus costs his mother 2 hours, which would amount to me paying $40 to ride the bus (which is about how much I pay in gas for an entire week). The investigator that chases the protagonist is offered ten minutes with a prostitute for an hour. That makes her a pretty cheap hooker at my wage, being $120 for an hour. Of course, it's worse for poor people. The more you have, the less of an impact, but I have looked at things for a long time and wondered if I was willing to trade five days of my life to obtain something.

Most characters in the film buy things that cannot satisfy and that are of no worth. The protagonist gives his friend ten years, and his friend promptly goes out and overdoses on alcohol with nine years left on his arm, nine years of wasted life. Recreation and entertainment rather than sustenance become the driving force for the poor. They know they will die soon, and so they choose to eat, drink and be merry. The rich never do anything because they can live forever unless they die accidentally. Thus, people who are alive never actually live, and the people doing the dying never live for anything valuable. They are willing to pay huge amounts of money for things. The protagonist pays several years worth of money for a car, something people buy to display, and several weeks of money for a meal (that must be some meal), and he wins money gambling. You see, that's the only risk for the rich. We mirror that in our world, paying far more than is wise for entertainment. I read today about the $300/month cell phone bill. I will admit I pay $55 for a single phone, but I get unlimited minutes, and it's not a smart phone, something for which my students regularly mock me. I only need a phone to make calls and receive messages, and I justify that bill because I don't have a house phone.

Ironically, this is exactly how our lives really are. We trade our life for a currency that we then trade for things we value. I can't get people to trade me directly what I offer for what I seek, so we use money (or time) as a medium of storage for our labor and our life until we find something we value enough to trade. However, imagine the power that would give you if you knew you were immortal unless you were foolish. What would you do? You know when you are going to die. You run out of time.

Everyone dies. Not everyone truly lives. Make sure when you die that you have not wasted your time, wasted your life, in things of no worth and things that do not satisfy. That was the worst part of the movie- everything was a big waste, and I understand why one of the characters chooses to time out. Machines go through the motions.

Fad Investments

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Somewhere, there are crates sitting around full of Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo dolls, and other items people loaded up on thinking they would be great investment opportunities. I remember when the newspaper was loaded up with ads offering Tickle Me Elmo for $500, reminiscent of Jingle All the Way where Arnold Schwarzenegger fights mall crowds for a fad toy for his son. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere out there someone is trying to corner the market on Hostess products thinking they can sell them on the internet and turn a profit. I know, because I mention it often, that they do this with gold.

In the end, an investment is only worth money if you can convince someone to pay you for it. I don't tend to buy a lot of stuff other people can easily liquidate, partially to discourage theft but partially because I value different things. I was reminded the other night while reminiscing that, after "investing" $10,000 into precious gemstones as a "business venture" my ex-wife came in to tell me she made her first sale, but that she had to give them a deal to make the sale, meaning that it cost us an additional $1.50 to make her first sale. She told me you have to spend money to make money. I asked what the $10,000 was for. This difference of values continues to plague me, as I cannot liquidate things I own because nobody would buy them or at least not put the same value into them that I attach to them. Most of my scrimshaw has a symbolic point. Not many folks buy scruples, but then not many folks seem to have them either.

My guiding light has been an item's utility. If I cannot get rid of them for the money, are they valuable some other way? I don't know what I'd do with hundreds of plush children's toys or with 50 cubic feet of gold ore. I suppose I could take a nap in the toys or use the gold as a door stop or a paperweight, but to me both of those are worth about as much as a dead ipod or a blown tire. In other words, I have no use for them, so I don't buy them.

Perhaps it comes back to my attitude on salesmen and purchases. I was offered a lucrative job out of graduate school selling drugs for a pharmaceutical company. However, I realized that I would not enjoy that because I cannot sell something I would not buy and because I cannot sell people something they don't need. That's why eBAY works for me, because the bidder has already decided he has need. You cannot pay me enough to do that job, because I can't motivate myself to buy it. I can sell chemistry because I believe in the principles, but I can't sell chemicals because, as my students can tell you, I don't really trust in them.

So I see twinkies on eBAY already. Ironically, there is a Hostess bakery just across the railroad tracks from the campus. Too bad they don't sell directly to the public. Meanwhile, I refer you to this quote from Brigham Young that is hanging on my fridge at home: "The time will come that gold will hold no comparison in value to a bushel of wheat." I believe that. Time to buy more wheat...

No Mistakes, Only Learning Opportunities

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I have been telling my students for years now that there are no mistakes, only learning opportunities. Failure shows us where to reconcentrate our efforts to increase our success and round out our skill set. For me at least, life consists of a series of opportunities to improve ourselves constantly in different aspects of character, habits, and values. Some of them remember me telling them to improve when they can and hold their ground when they get there. I believe it’s just as important for me to teach them these lessons as it is the chemistry curriculum the institution requires me to present. They are tools that will help them be successful. I do this so much that I’ve been asked why I don’t teach philosophy. I don’t have a degree in that, and in college, you teach what your degree says (thank God mine is Biochemistry). Some people never learned it in college.

While in graduate school, some gang members graffitied my house. The local sheriff’s office had made a big hullabaloo about their graffiti removal program, so I called, only to be confronted by a gruff man who seemed disinclined to acquiesce to my request. I filed a complaint with Internal Affairs. The investigating officer told me that he had enough to relieve this officer of his post and remove his pension. I told the IA officer to tell the man that he had a job still because I told them to let him keep it. He works for us, and if he’s going to be the face of the department, he needs to keep in mind that we are his customers.

Last night at the gym, the woman at the desk annoyed me greatly. She asked me to use the further racquetball court because it makes too much noise and she was trying to study for an exam. Her attitude made me feel like she felt she was more important than I, and I told her boss that you never inconvenience a customer to do something that is not related to work while you are at work. I asked him to remind her of this, with the proviso that if I ever hear or see her do it again, I will ask her to be punished.

My attitude on the subject surprised me. You can talk all you like, but when you are confronted with opportunities to see what you really believe, you find out the truth. For years, I have been saying that the first time can be a mistake, an accident, an oversight, but the second time is usually a choice. I have allowed them the chance to prove if it’s a moment of weakness because they were sad, tired, bored, having a bad day, or what have you. If I see it again, I will know it’s a pattern of behavior.

Perhaps I extend this courtesy because I have been recipient thereof. Even my current boss, for all the problems I have with her, came to me a few months back with a concern and asked me to correct it. I know that if I do it again, I will be reprimanded in writing, but if it goes away, it’s as if it never happened.

You will make mistakes. You will have moments of weakness. I have already written about allowing the atonement and hanging people for a moment, when that is not truth. Why does one moment ablate a lifetime of service while one grand act redeems a life of wickedness? You do not fall off the path suddenly. You wander off and are lost. As we learn to see things as opportunities we start seeing things for what they can be rather than just for what others around us want to make them become. You may not control what happens to you, but you can decide what you do about it from here.

Selfish Sacrifices

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With Obama’s reelection a week ago, talk has resumed of shared sacrifice, our fair share, and a whole litany of ideas that sound wonderful while they ignore the nature of man. Men are inherently selfish. You cannot change that by changing their behavior, and their behavior betrays their true sentiments.

Most utopians talk about how wonderful it would be if everything were equal. That’s an oversimplification. If murder and stealing pens from work are equal, none of them would like to be executed for purloining a pen from the office. If being a couch potato and a sewage pipe cleaner are equal, nobody will clean the sewer pipes if they can sit at home. They begin their argument by bastardizing a philosophical principle of the revolution- that men are equal. Their behaviors are not.

Recent news stories reveal that people don’t really want things to be equal as much as they want things to be better for them. From the Obama phones to extension of unemployment checks to free Wal-Mart gift cards for just showing up to a job fair, everyone seems to be looking at advancing himself regardless of how that impacts his neighbors. Perhaps that’s because we don’t really know our neighbors; perhaps it’s because they want to sound kind when they are really something else. Everyone has skeletons in his closet; maybe if we extol our own virtues and point out the motes in another they won’t notice our flaws.

To illustrate, in the last week, we have seen some retribution from people who perceive themselves as victims of the entitlement mentality. At Hostess, workers protest an 8% paycut that has led to a prolonged strike. The CEO announced that if they do not back off, Hostess, which has filed for bankruptcy for the second time in seven years, will lay off 18,000 people. In essence, if the protestors continue to insist what they demand and keep 8% of pay, 18,000 people will take a 100% paycut. Last week, an adjunct where I work told me during the course of a conversation that “you’re paying for health care for other people. You can pay for mine too” even though I never go to a doctor. She went on to talk about how she’s paid into it and that it’s “her money” even though we can’t afford to pay for it. Like many Social Security recipients, she demands her cut, what she paid in, regardless of our ability to pay. That’s very selfish. Over the past several years, state civil servants have refused to cut their budgets to help the state, county and city fix theirs. The policemen finally bent, and the teachers bent for a year, but the teachers are back demanding an increase in pay, and the firemen never made any concessions of which I am aware. Ironically, they do not realize that we can survive without them; they cannot survive without us because if there are no neighborhoods to patrol, children to teach, or fires to put out, what need have we for their services? Then there is Jesse Jackson Jr, who has been in treatment for bipolar disorder and who has been expelled from Congress who refuses to retire without disability. Of course he makes it all about him without worrying about what’s best for the people for whom he ostensibly works.

Then there’s me. Back in 2008, when the State of Nevada first went into a budget crisis officially, I wrote Governor Gibbons a letter. I impressed upon him the fact that we cannot spend money we do not have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. I know full well that the state is full of employees who draw paychecks but do not do much work if any at all, and if we remove them there is plenty of money to refurbish schools, buy computers, pay bills, give raises to people who do the most work per capita (like myself). Last week, despite being defeated 67-33 on the measure for more money, the school district changed tactics asking for a business tax when the property tax request failed. The school district “found” money last year. Why didn’t they use that to fix schools? I digress.

In my letter to Governor Gibbons, I asked him to lay people off, knowing that I might lose my job because I was relatively new. I explained that it was better for us to go do something they actually need than to pay people to staff offices on the chance that someone might need them. Particularly offensive is when, as a student told me last night, the DMV employees told him he just needed to get a different smog check to pass. That’s not very helpful, and neither he nor I know what the technicians are actually paid to do. They are paid to harass us. Very few of them are qualified to let alone interested in directing our activities in ways that will benefit our lives.

That’s not the rhetoric. We are the only species on the planet that puts the well being of other species over its own. We disenable raw materials to protect obscure beetles, rodents, and weeds, until and unless of course the time comes to fast track high speed rail across California. When it comes to their pet projects, all the rules fly out the window; when it comes to the interests of Liberals, the ends always justify the means, particularly if they benefit. Liberals believe in shared sacrifice until they are asked to sacrifice, and then they pepper Congress for redress.

What these events show me is that people are selfish. They are more interested in themselves when the time comes to put up or shut up than they are in the good of the many. I have taken a 15% paycut since arriving here, and I tell people that 15% beats 100%, but some people are willing to risk losing everything in order to not lose anything at all. That’s absurd and illogical. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, and I told the Department Chair once that I only count on the money in my account already. After all, another student discovered yesterday that was a good move when, after giving a month’s notice to be nice, they told her yesterday not to bother coming back at all. People are willing to do almost anything as long as it doesn’t cost them anything personally. They are free with other people’s resources but absolutely stingy with their own.

We cannot arrive at utopia unless people really mean to do what is necessary to live that way. We cannot have utopia if people do it grudgingly. Taking from one man and giving to another does nothing to advance society, because neither has benefitted from the virtue of the other. He who has was not allowed to decide to give and he who lacks was not allowed to decide if he wanted to receive. Entropy then, rather than virtue, has increased, and perhaps resentment arises in both parties. The nature of man is not geared to serve, sacrifice, or share. We cannot change that by legislating behavior. Obama would do well to remember that all real change begins from within. First clean your own house, and then you can see more clearly to clean up the house of another.

Something for Nothing

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On the way home from my parents after dinner, I was stuck behind a driver who was the kind I dislike the most. They seemed as if they didn’t know where they were going, as if they had never been in the neighborhood before, and as if they didn’t know how to drive the speed limit or follow traffic signs. I made very little progress. Stuck behind them, I noticed they had not one but two 2012 Obama bumper stickers. When they finally pulled into the casino near the freeway, it suddenly struck me that they might be part of the something for nothing crowd.

I have never been a fan of gambling. My ex-wife lost at least 33% of all the money she earned while we were married frittering it away in the casinos trying to get rich. It invites people to bring a small amount and leverage their luck to win a chance at money other people lost. If you win, it costs you very little, but the effect of winning even a little draws many powerfully to the tables time and time again until they lose more than just their money. It teaches people that wealth can be gained without effort, but what it doesn’t tell them is that in order for you to get something for nothing, someone else must pay for it.

Where there is no effort there also seems to be little value. As a teenager, my parents required me to pay for my first pairs of contac lenses. At what seemed to me exorbitant prices, I obtained two pairs, on which I doted; in fact, I have never cared for any possession as much as I cared for those. Thomas Paine reminded us that what we obtain too easily we esteem too lightly, and some people who obtain free stuff without paying for it do not realize that it costs someone something. These same people will say “there is no such thing as a free lunch” and “if it sounds too good to be true, it is” until they are offered it, and then too often they gobble it up. It strikes me as paradoxical every time it happens that they think they can get something for nothing. It costs me a great deal, as this video from Judge Judy illustrates:

The other problem is that what they offer us in return for limited time, life, and resources constitutes things of no worth. They promise us that everyone who signs up will get an iPhone, a Prius, and a chicken in every pot. Obama literally promised jobs, cars, and new kitchens in the 2008 campaign, none of which happened for the people to whom he made those promises. While they rail against corporations, they promise us the very things that corporations provide. What they don’t like isn’t corporations as much as it’s that we buy from corporations they happen to dislike. So, we take our cows down like Jack to market to trade for something that will sustain us, and they hand us three magic beans- hope, change, and peace- telling us it leads to some pie in the sky world where we fart rainbows and barf skittles. Just because it’s something doesn’t mean it’s valuable.

Subscribing to the utopian elitists invites us to trade something for nothing at all. They promise us something for nothing, but in reality they give us nothing for every something we hand them. Remember that people only give up things they do not value as much for something they value more. That’s the reason why I have coffee and tobacco in my food storage, not because I use them but because I know that people who are addicted to them will trade me anything for which I ask in order to get their fix. The something for nothing crowd is addicted to stuff just like some have said.

I attended a work Halloween activity with my father where they handed out trick or treat brickabrack to children. The stuff they handed out was worthless, but the kids came by and took handfuls. It was free to them, so whether they wanted it or not, needed it or not, made no difference. They were there, and we had stuff, and so they wanted it. They follow the buccaneer theory of economics- they do not care how much swag they have- they care that we have swag in our hold to which they feel they have a right because they exist. As I have written before, elitists, whatever their socioeconomic state, will always think you have too much freedom and too much money until you have none at all of either. Their pride will bring us all down.

"A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have." --Thomas Jefferson

Whose Square Are You?

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Years ago a close friend of mine asked me to consider what kind of tool in God’s toolbox I might actually be. He compared himself to a compass, something that shows the way, a role he has played in my life frequently off and on over the last seven years. While I am not exactly sure that this is my final answer, one of the tools that often crosses my mind is a carpenter’s square. Those who know me may chuckle a bit at this for their own reasons, which I leave to them. One of them once called me the squarest person he had ever met.

Carpenters use a square for two reasons that I understand. First, it is used as a reliable straight edge. In addition to having a linear ability to make things straight, it also helps you square up the corners. Secondly, the square also has a ruler, so that you know approximately how far you are from your goal or what kind of distance is required to make the cut. The square helps make sure that things line up where they need to be to make things flush and flat and fair, because otherwise it not only looks unsightly but may not come together, making all the other work in vain.

Recently, I worked on a project with my father that required us to use a special kind of square that he fashioned. By that time, we had planed, sanded, cut, joined, routed, and done all other kinds of work to the wood. When it came time to put the frame of the pocket doors together, it was extremely important that they all line up and do so at the same time, or else all our other work might be wasted. Small bows in the wood and errors in cutting were overcome by the proper application of pressure. The frame looks amazing, but it’s not perfect. It was made by a fighter pilot and a chemistry professor, not by professional carpenters.

They say that the only difference between a professional and an amateur is that one of them is paid.

In our carpentry, my father and I came prepared to tolerate a certain degree of fudge factor. You reach a point after which the cost to align things perfectly outstrips the return that you can expect looking at it. After all, most people won’t notice that, and if they do, that says more about them than it says about my work building it. This tolerance means that nothing I build is perfectly square.

That’s really the bottom line. Nothing built by man is perfectly square. Men are flawed, and it is not theoretically possible for anything to create something more perfect than the creator. I find the fascination with artificial intelligence and evolution fascinating because it ignores the law that entropy always increases. Even Asimov acknowledges that in his novels. My efforts already put useful work into the wood that made it more organized than before, but without a continued and consistent investment, the wood of which it is made will fade, dull, crack, and eventually decompose. It will not evolve into an elephant.

We try to be square, and we try to line up, but ultimately, the Master Carpenter is the only one who can fashion a contraption to make us more perfect than we are today. I am honored and humbled to be useful to Him as that particular instrument, and I thank Him for His tolerance of my imperfections as I am not the best tool in His toolbox. In those times, I think of this quote from Neal Maxwell: “God gives the picks and shovels to the ‘chosen’ because they are willing to go to work and get callouses on their hands. They may not be the best or the most capable, but they are the most available.” I am here. I am trying to make His paths straight. I hope that my sacrifice will be acceptable to Him.

Who's square are you? Whose paths are you trying to make straight? No matter how well-meaning and compassionate they may seem, most people are intolerant and selfish until and unless they begin with first principles and value individuals and their rights over the so-called "masses". They want to be regarded as individuals; they must show the same decorum to you. I know that it can be hard to be a Don Quixote, but the successful quixotic quest is one in which you learn to enjoy the ride while you charge. It's easier to enjoy when you begin with everything in line.

As You Really Are

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Heading into the election tomorrow, I see a plethora of passionate and biased analysis. People are choosing to see or at least mention only the virtues in themselves or their candidate while mentioning only the evil in the people with whom they disagree or whom they dislike. The fact of the matter is that the picture is much more complicated than that. Back in February 2011, I posted the following to Facebook: "Other people manufacture labels to describe us quickly without having to get to know us. Each man is far too complicated in his facets to be so accurately distilled. " We are far more complicated than even I can discuss in this post, but I will make a few points.

People often talk about what we "deserve" without realizing what that means. Even some of my friends talk about the good things I deserve, so much so that I began to believe them. This made me feel bitter, like a victim, and to talk angrily of the boons experienced by others I viewed as less worthy than myself. Then a dear friend pointed out that in truth, I'm already getting better than I deserve. You need not suppose me guilty of any great transgression, but I am a human. I am often self-centered, lazy, anxious to avoid difficulty, and a whole host of minute albeit common human traits. I don't always give money to the people at the off ramp (it would eventually come to feel like a toll to go home every day since they are there almost every night at the exit to my house). I don't always help out when I can. I don't always share what I can afford. I am not always eager to give of myself. The nice thing about it is that I'm honest about that whereas other people are not. The bad thing is that in the system of justice we have imagined up to ourselves, I deserve to be punished because I am not the paragon of virtue some people believe me to be.

Secondly, people who know me have heard me say before how much I believe what CS Lewis wrote about human nature. I do not believe that if you strip away all that is good in man that you are left with a bad man. I believe that you would be left with nothing at all. Even Tolkienn agreed with Lewis on that philosophical point, or at least he allowed Aragorn to say so, talking about the great things in men when he rallied the men of Gondor to buy Frodo time to destroy the ring. Sure, there are evils in men, and those evils live after us. Sometimes they loom large even though they are not true. The honest man realizes that men have strengths and weaknesses and weighs them appropriately. The dishonest man points out the mote in his neighbor's eye to distract men from the beam in his own.

The wisest man realizes that any weakness makes him weak and turns to a higher power for help. Your Achilles Heel may not be physical. Perhaps it's psychological, financial, intellectual, spiritual, chemical, nutritional, etc., but EVERY ONE OF US HAS ONE that just like with Achilles can and will bring us down in the fight for right. We are not paragons. We are humans. Making mistakes is part of what the universe allows us that it does for no other life form of which we are cognizant. An ecclesiastical leader in my youth once said that smart men learn from their experiences and wise men learn from the experiences of others. I submit that wise men lean on Christ and allow Him to make weak things become strong in them through the Atonement.

Ignoring the weaknesses has led to the downfall of every powerful group, civilization, and man ever born. You see, your enemies seek out your weaknesses to exploit them, and if you pretend you don't have them, you are the fool twice- fool that you are dishonest with yourself, hence undermining all your other virtues, and secondly that you are foolish enough to think that you cannot be defeated. The "greatest city in the world" was humbled last week by a Category I hurricane. Imagine if it had been a Category V. Bad situations can wear down good people, and none of us are really that good. We benefit from Christ's mercy which allows us to be blessed in spite of what we actually and honestly deserve.

I'm a pretty good man, but I am just a man. You will make mistakes. Don't let your mistakes make or mark you.

Compassionate Selfishness

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Democrats like to paint themselves as the party of sacrifice and cooperation while they libel their opponents as greedy. In the wake of hurricane Sandy's landfall in New York City, they have shown these claims to be at least partially projection of their own selves, even if the aspersions are true. In 1995, I worked on a hurricane relief crew, and it was a very illuminating and transformative experience. In some ways, I think it laid the foundation of my political philosophy.

Then as now, people in the affected areas have a particular type of aid they prefer and a particular type of aid they need. The immediate priorities are food and shelter, as usual, and yet unlike Hurricane Katrina I do not see a lot of food or habitable shelter efforts being accomplished there. Perhaps it's because of the unique nature of New York City, but I am glad I don't live there. The aftermath of Sandy shows us just how dangerous it is to national security to overly urbanize America. A massive attack or disaster cripples a huge fraction of our population.

A great majority of New Yorkers are, I believe, not only registered democrats but also democrats deeply steeped in the party platform. What I see in their behavior makes Democrats appear to be the Party of Selfishness. Mayor Blomberg insists that the marathon must go on, powering the tent with a generator that could power 400 standard sized homes. Union workers drive out volunteers from AL, calling them scabs there to take their jobs. Isn’t it about getting people back up on life support? The Union workers view this as wages lost rather than seeing the importance of protecting the customers so they can continue to pay in the future. Many care recipients are complaining about Red Cross cookies and milk while people dive in dumpsters, because they need blankets and such. Elsewhere, gangs pilfer abandoned homes. Isn’t it about shared sacrifice? You get swag because you stayed?

Sandy's aftermath is a microcosm for the failure of Democrat promises. Blomberg had 11 years to shore up the shoreline against a disaster and did nothing. Obama shows up for a photo session and then leaves, and now people are clamoring for him (of all people) not to forget them as they starve and freeze. It shows just how bad it can be in close quarters as looters rampage and gangs pillage and feces accumulates in the hallways as unions bicker over who can repair what. Then the environmentalists come in and warn against developing the shoreline, as if developing the shoreline renders the city more likely to flood. Mass transit, one panacea of the left, is useless. What mass transit is accessible has no power or fuel to run, so people can’t get anywhere in a city where mobility depends on that unless you walk or are rich enough to afford $6/gallon gas.

Like New Orleans, New York is a city managed by leftists. Like New Orleans, New York is a city that is languishing in ruins despite its wealth and pomp. People are going to die, Americans, in New York City of all places, because the policies of an egalitarian utopia interferes with the most efficient and effective means to rebuild and recover. Obama doesn't come to help; he comes because if he doesn't they might say of him what they said of Bush after Katrina. I feel bad for New Yorkers who have such piss-poor leaders. They are going to freeze to death, starve to death, and be beaten to death because of selfishness on the part of Democrat party members, voters, and potentates.

While Freedom means that it's possible the you might fail or die or suffer, these disasters have shown that Socialism cannot prevent those eventualities. While Freedom creates some winners, Socialism renders everyone a loser. As you go to the polls next week, keep in mind the words of Samuel Adams, which are oddly as prescient today as they were in his time as they continue to find dead bodies in one of our most prosperous cities.

Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then ask 'what should be the reward of such sacrifices?' Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains rest lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen! --Samuel Adams

Vote for freedom. Let us now apply liberty.