dangerous liberty

Read Colson commenting on CS Lewis’ birthday, Discerning the Trends.

Lewis has had a great influence upon my Christian intellectual development. In him I found a great mental and spiritual depth and an ability to pierce the veil of established religious dogmas.

His insights into the nature of reality and (perhaps more importantly) his understanding of competing philosophies for the hearts and minds of men have always brought great satisfaction - one born of my own light, repeatedly flipping on as I read Lewis’ thoughts.

For instance, in The Screwtape Letters, a passage about the nature of eternity says the ‘present is full of eternal rays’. The past is already written and the future is uncertain, but the present moment is the place where we choose and act. Even Christ said “The kingdom of God is NOW”.

This one insight is rich, deep and yet so simple. I marvel each time I consider it.

And in The Great Divorce, the most remarkable thing was the notion that God sends no one to hell, he makes the afterlife such that individuals at the doorstep of heaven are put in the position to reject entering in, and the clever thing was that those set in their ways and already solidly determined as to ‘how things should be’, rejected Reality for The Shadowlands.

Colson is absolutely correct that Evangelicals have some work cut out in terms of understanding the culture outside of the sub-culture of the church. It is one thing to know the bible inside and out, it is quite another to be able to deal with the epistemology of other world views, especially those dominant among the cultural elite.

I couldn’t get all the kids to smile pretty and look at the camera at the same time. Thank god for Macromedia Fireworks! (click continue reading to see pictures)

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My apologies for the mulitple pings to the fellas at Powerline, I cleared their trackback address out of both of my edits, but MT still pinged them!

The boys over at Powerline take a look at an NYT Sunday Mag column by Jim Holt.

I could not tell from this post whether the idea of states’ rights was good or bad in their view, but I can say that I welcome any liberal who champions such. Their fear now of conservative power over that leviathan we call Uncle Sam should be used as a wake up call to limited government and state sovereignty. It sounds like a good place to come together in seeking a common goal! As Holt notes at the end of his piece,

Meanwhile, blue-state liberals should stop despairing and start thinking locally. Instead of saying, ”The United States is. . . . ” try saying, ”The United States are. . . . ” See? You feel better already.

Hindrocket notes they’ll address the foolishness being put forward by Holt and the ever petulant Larry O’Donnell which says the Blue states are the wealth producers and the Red states the recipient of their welfare.

This idea is so contrary to simple economics, they shouldn’t have to write too much! For instance, the west and east coast makes their money how? Who buys their insurance policies? Whose retirements are invested in their trading houses? Whose income purchases the products advertised on television and the tickets and DVDs for movies produced out of Hollywood and New York? Who buys the housing and auto products produced in union factories? Who pays for the imports unloaded in union controlled docks on the coasts?

O’Donnell and others who hold the blue states as the rich producers seem to have ZERO clue of the source of that wealth.

Regular Americans are John Galt. Look at the decline in TV ratings and viewers. Many of us are shrugging.

Here is a man deserving honor. Here is a role model for the rest of us. He is living and practicing his faith in Iraq as an NCO in our military. I read his blog regularly and trust his integrity.

Read this account (and the stuff linked before it) about the resolution to an official investigation into his activities in Iraq.

God works in marvelous ways.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. It’s coming to a public high school or middle school near you and it has been coming here for a couple of years now. What is “it”? It’s “Challenge Day” and if you feel your child’s school experience hasn’t been emotional enough to date, you’re going to be one very happy parent because the tears and snot quotient is about to rise precipitously. On the other hand, those of you who are privy to enough emotional trauma with your teenager had best gird your loins and, perhaps more importantly, hide your wallets. Challenge Day, in a nutshell, is meant to heal the wounds suffered by young adolescents who are victims of bullying in school, and ostensibly, to heal the bullies themselves who, after all, are just misunderstood. It does this by dividing kids up into groups and encouraging them to feel sorry for themselves.

Let’s talk a little bit about what “Challenge Day”, the organization, is. A cursory look at this program’s “Global Leadership Council” reveals some interesting characters. The site itself doesn’t tell you anything about them, but the Google search engine does. I’d love to tell you about all of them, but that would take up too much space, so I’ve selected just three. We have, for instance, Brenda Blasingame who is, among other things, an activist for bi-sexuals and bisexuality and whose book on the subject is entitled: “Power and Privilege Beyond the Invisible Fence” Debbie Ford’s ‘best-selling’ book is entitled: “The Dark Side of the Light Chasers“. Her mission is described as being “…to empower people to become the conscious designers of their lives and create the external circumstances that most clearly reflect their heart’s desires.” Good grief! Another member of the Global Leadership Council is Alanis Morrisett who, I trust, needs no introduction.

Here’s how Challenge Day describes its raison d’etre: “For millions of young people every day,” it intones, “violence and alienation has become deeply ingrained in his or her school experience.” I feel an almost unholy need to correct this poorly written sentence. It should read more like this: “For millions of young people every day, violence and alienation HAVE become deeply ingrained in THEIR school experienceS”. I’m not trying to be petty. I’m pointing out what sure as heck looks to me like an irony (although Alanis might disagree with me): that irony being that in the very first sentence on its homepage, the sentence that is meant to hit us between the eyes, we find such a poor example of grammar and syntax. You’d think they’d want to be very careful not to draw attention to what it looks like when people don’t write well…since, you know, they’re taking kids out of their classrooms to participate in this stuff. And just to make the irony (or whatever it is) a little bit more pronounced, hasn’t there been a good deal of hand-wringing around here regarding whether teachers can be expected to prepare our kids for the FCAT after all the unscheduled “hurricane days”? This program usually takes two full days. One for Challenge Day and another for Challenger Day. Have we got the time to spend on what amounts to sensitivity training from an organization that can’t manage to formulate a decent opening sentence on its own homepage?

And there are more problems with this business than just that it is time-consuming or that its message may be badly written or politically skewed. While Challenge Day, itself, is a not-for-profit organization, it has been run jointly, apparently, with a for-profit organization which calls itself “Resource Realizations”. RR is connected to what Michelle Malkin (April 19, 2002 “See Dick and Jane Weep”) refers to as “kiddie rehab” programs. She tells us that it has also been a defendant in several law-suits alleging claims of emotional abuse at its facilities. What seems to be the drill is that following Challenge Day and the emotional upheaval foisted on students, it is suggested that more (rather expensive) work may need to be done. At which point, Resource Realizations enters the picture.

As reported in the Seattle Times of April 10, 2002: “A letter from Resource Realizations founder David Gilcrease to the parents of Challenge Day participants said “the next step for your teen” is the company’s three-day, $295 Teen Discovery seminar. Brochures were provided for a May 3-5 seminar at the Ramada Inn on Northgate Way.”

“While Challenge Day is a critical first step, a one-day learning experience only goes so far,” Gilcrease wrote. “To create truly lasting transformation in their lives, most teens need more.”

I can’t tell you if the two organizations are still connected in any way, but I can tell you to keep an eagle eye out for people trying to get your kid into some pricey programs as a follow-up to Challenge Day. I can also tell you that our district has seen fit to support this program without a “by your leave”, or any attempt at all to inform parents as to its contents, or its rather sketchy past. Thus far, a few parents who’ve tried to inquire about it have met with a blank wall. Nobody, not the school principals, nobody at the school board, nor the teachers seems to be able (or willing) to give inquiring minds any sort of definitive idea what a child attending this program might expect to find.

All of this has been organized and paid for locally by a group called “Circle of Change”. I am assuming that there are “Circles of Change” being set up locally around the country in order to help promote this program in their districts. This would be worth looking into more deeply, as well. Although about half of the workshops will be held off-campus (at The Martin Luther King Center), the rest are being held on school campuses. The program wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t being set up via the public school system and endorsed by it. I get a very creepy feeling about this. It feels to me like a form of emotional blackmail being perpetrated on kids in the name of political correctness, and I don’t like it a bit. Worse than that, it seems to me to encourage a sense of victimhood. I’m put in mind of something I saw on the Simpsons not too long ago. Bart asks Homer: “Am I the only one who’s in terrible pain?” and Homer answers, “No, but you’re the only one who won’t shut up about it.” Kids having undergone this sort of program are likely never going to shut up about how they’ve “suffered” at the hands of bullies. I don’t know what bullied kids did before there was a Challenge Day…I guess they did as I did, sucked it up, and steered clear of the little thugs.

Look, I hate to seem like a Scrooge, especially as we approach the holiday season, but why is it that I don’t see anyone on the list of responsible people at Challenge Day who is likely to be promoting the values that *I* hold dear? What business has our school system got…a system designed to accommodate people with values of all sorts…trucking in an organization of this ilk to spend school time on what amounts to an encounter session? I’m sorry folks but that ain’t representative of what I consider to be important and I pay my taxes, too. Doesn’t what I want count? Since when is it a function of public education to indulge in sensitivity training or, as one student referered to it, “..a psycho cry-fest” ?

I highly recommend that parents investigate this further before allowing their children to become involved. I highly recommend, further, that the school district stick to academics and making sure that kids can pass the FCAT. I think our school board is skating on thin ice with this one, and needs to reign in the “good-for-you” social programming in favor of some “better-for-you” old-fashioned scholarship. And they’d best do it before their support for this kind of thing blows up in their faces.

Read Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual, (via insta) in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

No active or noisy elimination need occur, and no explicit queries about political orientation need be posed. Political orientation has been embedded into the disciplines, and so what is indeed a political judgment may be expressed in disciplinary terms. As an Americanist said in a committee meeting that I attended, “We can’t hire anyone who doesn’t do race,” an assertion that had all the force of a scholastic dictum. Stanley Fish, professor and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, advises, “The question you should ask professors is whether your work has influence or relevance” — and while he raised it to argue that no liberal conspiracy in higher education exists, the question is bound to keep conservatives off the short list. For while studies of scholars like Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri seem central in the graduate seminar, studies of Friedrich A. von Hayek and Francis Fukuyama, whose names rarely appear on cultural-studies syllabi despite their influence on world affairs, seem irrelevant.

I noticed the same thing years ago when I debated a Professor of History about economics. He had never heard of von Mises and the sum total of his rebuttal to the ideas I put forward was “he’s an unknown”. He dismissed all intellectually conservative arguments I had because the scholars weren’t in peer reviewed journals of his liking.

A few months before the election he ceased communication because he felt he could not be friends with anyone who supported Bush. He’s now totally isolated from challenges to his orthodoxy.

I just watched the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan on ABC. All the crosses at the beginning representing the lives lost in the horror of those beaches and the valor of those men brought tears to my eyes.

Today a young boy was waiting to get his hair cut while my own son was in the chair. I noticed he was wearing a shirt with a picture of a soldier in Iraq caption “My Daddy”. His hair was barely an inch in length and he was there to get it cut high and tight. I asked him if his father was in Iraq and yes, he is. He’s been there 8 months and is due home in 4 (hopefully). He drives a truck. I welled with emotion trying to talk to this boy and express the gratitude I had toward him and his mom, who are missing that soldier. The mom told me they webcam with dad every night, so they get to see each other daily, which makes things easier. What an age we live in!

Anyway, I’m grateful and thankful for every US soldier and the sacrifices they and their families make to protect our land. May the end of this current conflict come sooner and may the fathers return to their children.

Over at the conservative Heritage Foundation, an informative defense:
The Electoral College: Enlightened Democracy.

I hope we don’t let populist arguments defeat good republican government, as it did with the 17th Amendment.

Read Blackfive’s Vote Is Disenfranchised - a report from a retired Major in Chicago. Has voted in all elections in recent years but was purged from the rolls. Saw many other Republicans purged from voter lists, despite having a record of recent votes in that precinct.

Democrats are nasty. F’ing nasty. What a disgraceful party.