Immigrantion--Arizona On The Firing Line

I’m not sure I’d want to live on the Arizona border. On one side you’ve got the vast sucking vacuum coming from employers in the United States desperate to hire illegal immigrants to harvest their crops or work their meat packing plants.
It’s an ideal labor source. They can be paid less than minimum wage, they have no legal rights, if they make any sort of fuss they can be packed back to Mexico. Some form of slavery has been necessary to maintain every advanced society since ancient Egypt. Illegals are ours.
In the mid-1800s, a flood of induced immigration from southern and eastern Europe kept our factory wages at a dollar a day, year after year after year. Now the Latino immigrants provide us with cheap food and meat.
That’s almost as much suction drawing immigrants in as you have from a Black Hole in space. Then there’s the pressure on the Mexican side of the border coming from people to whom American peonage looks like riches beyond belief.
Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and California are caught smack dab in the middle. They didn’t create either pressure source, but the consequences of both pass across Arizona desert by the hundreds and thousands nearly every day.
(Growing up in Michigan, amidst some of the richest vegetable growing muck land in the world, I was always aware that migrant Mexicans came and went with each harvest season. Things have changed today—that irreplaceable muck is now covered over with houses and parking lots. No one harvests celery or veggies any more.
(Fewer and fewer migrants come; more and more stay. Now whole communities—and whole neighborhoods in cities—are Hispanic. They vote; they demonstrate—and they vote instinctively in favor of the migrants they once were.
(They have no love for the majority white/black communities around them and very little concern for what the concerns of those communities might be. Emotion and ancestral memory of crossing the deserts and rivers of the American frontier guide them.)
So Arizona enacted a law like those in nearly every other nation on earth. A police officer in that state can walk up to anyone and ask to see identification to prove he or she has a legal right to be in the United States.
You would think they had been granted the right to strip search them in the public square. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to demonstrate against Arizona’s new law tomorrow. There was a time when objection to such a police power might have been justified.
After all, many of the native born white Americans who settled our frontiers had excellent reason not to be identified as they walked the streets of Dodge City or Yuma. Outstanding warrants or bankruptcy service in Ohio, New Jersey or Alabama were best forgotten.
Hopefully that’s not true of quite so many Americans today. I, for one, would have no problem showing an officer my picture I.D. at any point. I carry it with me almost always anyway. Frankly I’m a bit suspicious of the motives of those who protest.
It seems to me to be eminently reasonable to ask people who look like they might come from Mexico, Haiti, Central America or the Caribbean to show some valid American identification. (Since that designation can cover nearly all colors, including my own, I would expect to be asked from time to time myself.) It’s a first step to getting our borders back under control.
No one has come up with a better idea. I understand the emotion of those who protest—just as I would understand the emotion of a man who fled to Texas one step ahead of Illinois law—but sometimes you just have to pull a weaving driver over and test for alcohol—for the safety of all. For the safety of all, it may be necessary to check the validity of someone’s—or my--presence on the street. I’m content to share my identity with you or anyone else.
Sorry, the days of Doc Holiday and Jesse James are over. These champions of the fabled American right to total privacy are gone. We’re none-the-worse for it.

Schools--Are Our Kids REALLY Worth It?

The other day I was subbing in a nice, safe suburban school. When I could let my eyes wander from keeping things from flying through the air or people from slipping in or out of the door, I looked up at a sign I’ve seen on many classroom walls.”
“Our kids,” it says, “are worth whatever it takes”. A lovely sentiment. Repeated over and over in classroom after classroom. Whatever it takes—our kids are worth it. The question crossed my mind—Is there any truth to that sign?
(No! I’m not talking about budgetary woes or millage shortfalls. I’m talking about the emotional and intellectual exertion, the sheer mental effort it takes to get kids to understand, question, learn and grow. Are we putting THAT into them?)
Do we really care? Are “our kids” worth the effort it would take to make serious, growing student s out of them? Let’s ask what would be really “worth it”.
Are our kids worth HOLDING ACCOUNTABLE? Are they worth going through all the hassle and complaining involved in telling them that they have work due tomorrow—and it MUST be done? Are they worth telling them there will be no retests?
Are they worth letting them fall flat on their faces if they have spent sixteen years refusing to listen or respond? Are they worth letting them flunk if they do not do the work? Are our kids really worth that much—or would we really prefer to go on shielding them from reality until it is too late to escape it?
Are our kids worth DISCIPLINING? Sometimes discipline has to be downright unpleasant to be effective. It may even have to hurt. Losing a job, smashing up a marriage or getting arrested can be seriously hurtful. Discipline that might prevent such experiences can in no way hurt more.
The Bible, interestingly enough, doesn’t say, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” It says something much stronger and more thought provoking: “He that spares the rod HATES his son; he that loves his son punishes him when necessary.” [Proverbs 13:24]
Ask yourself, what’s more loving, more caring. Letting the kid careen into flunking and failure, or getting his attention by making him hurt—and preventing the disaster?
Are our kids worth allowing them to reap CONSEQUENCES of really bad choices and actions. Some day you won’t be able to shield the kid from things that really happen. There’ll be no more retests or forgetting about it. Better a few consequences should land on them now than when they are legal adults with real responsibilities.
Are our kids worth INSISTING THAT THEY DO THEIR SCHOOLWORK and not keep sloughing it off? (it is a horrible pain to go through all the excuses, whining and bellowing that kids can throw in the path of a determined parent or teacher.)
That would be really caring enough—showing that the kids are “worth whatever it takes”. You’d have to give the teacher some tools to work with—including punitive ones. I’m sure this is definitely not what the “educator” who composed the sign had in mind. He or she was going for something far more saccharin and feel-good at the moment.
But fear is, after all, one of the impelling reasons people come to work on time and turn their projects in on time as adults. Fear keeps our speed down to fairly reasonable limits. Fear of the sergeant keeps the raw recruits jogging with their backpacks on. (It eventually keeps them alive when live ammunition is flying around.)
It’s sometimes necessary in the home and at school. It is—as any employer or military leader will tell you—a necessary component of leadership and of getting positive results.
Believe it or not, making certain you are at least a little bit feared is a necessary part of showing that your kids are really “worth whatever it takes”. It shows you care enough to go to the trouble to make sure they succeed. That’s real caring.
Just don’t expect to be thanked—now.

Obama and NASA

Obama has slashed the space program budget. This will offend people of my age who remember the Glory Days when we beat the Russians to the moon (“Rah, rah, rah—go team”) as well as those who profess a love of knowledge for its own sake.
Neither are adequate reasons for maintaining the space program in its present form. Were I in Obama’s place, I would probably have cut NASA way back too. Years ago I began looking at the space program through the eyes of historical precedent. I didn’t like what I saw.
Compare NASA today to the court of Henry the Navigator in the 1400s. Henry knew there was land (planets) out there; he knew there was MONEY to be made from those lands. He invested on a century long program of exploration that eventually paid off in billions if not trillions.
We can’t say that about NASA or any aspect of the space program today. (Yes, to paraphrase “Cabaret”, “Money, money, money is what makes exploration go around”.) Columbus was sent to make money. When he didn’t find it, they tossed him in jail.
Cortes found it—and began a long chain of successful exploration that brought back vast fortunes in gold, silver, spices, tobacco, sugar, furs, cotton, coffee, bananas, diamonds, rare metals and oil. To merit serious funding, the space program has to pay for itself the same way.
NASA has to begin working on four things, right here on earth, before we buy it any new, big toys. ONE) Ships with bigger payloads. Right now over 90% of the space on our space rockets is wasted on fuel. The payload (cargo) is limited to a few hundred pounds.
It’s going to be hard to build mining and living stations on other planets transporting materials in such tiny increments. We won’t be able to bring the goodies back in large enough amounts to pay for the huge number of flights needed.
We’ve got to get past gravity. Fantastic? No more so than taking building blocks of the universe that we cannot even see and creating atomic energy. We don’t even understand electricity, but it seems to make my computer and my refrigerator work just fine. In the 1940s, we had to build an atomic bomb; today we have to get past gravity. Improbable—but we did it then.
TWO) We have to start working on locating stuff we need. We have to make plans (and equipment) for how exploratory teams are going to look for it once we get to this stuff on other planets. How are we going to get it on the ships? How are we going to get it onto the planet?
If our spectrometers locate an unknown substance on Mars even now (like sugar, oil or potatoes in the new world), we have to be figuring out possible uses of it even at this stage. No one in Henry’s court could have told you what they were going to find in Montezuma’s back yard.
THREE) We’ve got to work on speed. Admittedly, the entire “age of exploration” took place in times when it took weeks and months to cross from one land mass to another. But the industrial age, which eventually produced a slave-free modern society, didn’t really get rolling until we could cross oceans in a few days.
Just like atomic energy and gravity, we have to get past the speed of light. Trickier, no doubt. Not an immediate need—but our imaginations are already nibbling at it. We’ll certainly never get to the age of Kirk and Spock without doing so. We should work on it, beginning now.
FOUR) We have to come up with “shields” of some sort to protect our ships and space stations. Space is full of nasty little projectiles that hurtle about at dangerous speeds and smash into things. Our atmosphere mostly protects us from them. Ships in space don’t have protective atmosphere.
Scientists tell us that our current space station has just been lucky so far. A fleet of ships that travel regularly from one planet to another will probably need more than luck. When we put people and equipment up there we will need to protect them from meteorites, asteroids and who knows what all else may be whizzing about.
Tell NASA, stay home and worry about basic things like these. When you’re on your way to solving them, we can talk about big budgets and voyages of exploration. We should still dream of “boldly going where no one has gone before”, we just aren’t ready yet.

Black/White Distrust II

Over the past decade I’ve had the interesting experience of substitute teaching in over 50 different buildings, ranging from inner city to completely rural, from less than 10% black to better than 90%. It has been an education.
I cannot say that I have particularly enjoyed my time in schools that were mostly black. Interestingly, the district wouldn’t let me sign up for the blackest schools. “They don’t want you, and you don’t want to be there.”
When I took an assignment in a middle school that was only about 90% black, a black teacher’s aide who seems to have pitied me warned, “You are an older white male. When you walk around here, you have a target on your back. Don’t forget it.”
She was so right. In that school—and only in that school—I had my briefcase rifled. Some days I had to break up two fights before the bell even rang. There were non-stop accusations that I was racist—try telling a black student that he has to do the same assignment anyone else has to do. He is almost certain to try to back you off with that charge.
I came up at a time when whites were being forcefully re-educated about using the term “black” rather than “Negro”. (W.E.B. DuBois had forced us to switch from “black” to “Negro” fifty years before—it gets confusing.) One day an angry young student vituperatively corrected me again, “We are called ‘African-Americans’!” she snapped at me.
I asked her what in the world THAT term meant—pointing out that I have a French neighbor who was born in Africa and is now an American. John Kerry’s wife qualifies—she is Portuguese, born in Africa, now a naturalized American. I admit my frustration resulting from accusation after accusation of being “prejudiced” or “bigoted” came to the fore.
My oldest friend, I went on, is married to a lovely French woman born in Africa, now American. I’ve known Dutchmen and Englishmen who qualified. I could have pointed out that my two lily-white sons could qualify—descendent as they are from a Swede who was born in Africa in 1635. For good measure, he was probably a slave trader.
The young lady marched to the principal’s office and declared me racist. The principal, a black man who had grown up in the neighborhood and even gotten himself expelled from that very school—and who knew me quite well—took her to his computer and showed her the history of “black” nomenclature. Then he sent her on her way.
Then there’s the line, “I ain’t your slave!” (I was citing a school rule.) Or, “You’re only telling me to be quiet because I’m black!” (No, because you are the loudest most disruptive fellow in the room—he had to grace to shut up.)
Walk into a largely white school at 7;00am. There will be smiles, occasional greetings. If they know you, they will call you by name and even ask how you are. Walk into a black school. They will studiously avoid looking at you. If accidentally they do meet your eye, you will see raw animosity. Eventually you feel like an idiot for smiling yourself. I definitely felt like I was a prison guard coming on duty—with the need to watch my back constantly.
The hostility is rooted in the absolute certainty that I am not there to do any of them any good. They trust no white person. It has to come from things their families inculcate in them—rather than any experiences they have yet had in their young lives.
And, if I’m in my right mind, I’d better no trust any of them. One time I left my reading glasses on the desk as I walked to the door to excuse the class. They were deliberately broken when I got back to the desk. (The school eventually replaced them—but they dragged their feet for months and, shortly after, dropped me from their list of available subs. I don’t miss it.)
Mendela showed us the way. After 27 years in prison, he dropped his own animosity and proclaimed everyone, black and white, to be a South African. If we can’t do that here—and make it stick—we are in for a long, rough future.

Black/White Distrust I

We are talking about black/white distrust. About why it is so much easier to befriend an African or Caribbean black person—about why I instinctively distrust even Barack Obama and his wife—just because he is an American born black man. I am certain that if we ever met, the feeling would be entirely mutual. Because of who and what we are.
I’ve seen the insides of a hurting white person more than once in my life—whether it was pain from death, betrayal, loss of a job, loss of a hope or dream. Only once have I been permitted to look beyond the grinning face of a black human being and observe the real person.
Let’s call him J.J. He was about my age, in his late twenties. I had grown up in a reasonably tony area of Grand Rapids; he had grown up in the bowels of segregated Washington, D.C. He would look at his very dark skin and reminisce, “I was so black even the niggers discriminated against me. When I talked college, my counselors advised trade school.”
He made it through college (and, later, law school). He served four years in the army. His colonel was a southerner who hadn’t adapted to Truman’s integration of the military a decade before—but because of his sheer competence he advanced J.J. to captain in less than four years.
(He just didn’t let J.J. actively command troops.) By the time I knew him, he was a Special Assistant to the President of the United States. I’ve known few men I respected more. We met while we were both working for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In the fall of 1967, a year before the 1968 election, LBJ and his advisors took a look at the explosive political situation (rife with civil rights riots all over the nation) and realized he wasn’t going to get re-elected without a lot of help from angry white voters.
So he began to dial back the activities of agencies like the EEOC. He placed a very wealthy black man from “Strivers’ Row” in Harlem as Chairman of the EEOC and had him bring in a lot of his white Harvard buddies to help run the agency—more circumspectly.
The new white guys didn’t know diddly squat. Someone had to break them in. The agency chief gave J.J. the job of taking these clueless white folk on a intimate tour of the Washington ghetto. So he took them out and showed them.
I was the person who sat with him after he returned from these tours and unwound. All the humiliation, pent up memories, frustration in the man poured out as I listened and watched.
Some of it was funny. He would walk past a couple of kids, reach down inside a bag they were carrying—and show the burglary tool to the newbie. Or he would walk up to a group of young black men standing on a corner, start a conversation and bring the white man into it.
At the next corner where there was a group of young men, he would turn to him and say, “Now you do it.” Easier, far easier, for that man to empty the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon. But no humiliation of his clueless white charge could quite measure up to his own.
He told me how, at a White House reception with all manner of hors d’oeuvres on display, conspicuous at one side of the table would be a platter of fried chicken for him and any other blacks present. He learned to live with it.
I mistook our relationship for actual friendship. One weekend I was throwing a party—I casually invited him to bring his wife and come. He looked at me. “A lot of invitations I can’t turn down—but yours I can. I’m sorry; I’ve been the nigger at too many parties.” Ouch. How stupid of me. But some mistakes you simply cannot take back.
We went on working together. We covered each other’s back in an increasingly treacherous environment—but nothing was ever quite the same between us. I had foolishly presumed. My education in racial distrust was continuing.
But he had let me—wittingly or no—see into his real self. I had seen at least some of his insides. I never forgot that—I never stopped respecting him.
But we could never have been friends.
More next time.

Michigan's Hiroshima--Black/White Distrust

I wrote yesterday about the chasm of distrust between whites and blacks in Detroit, in Washington and in most of the nation. I was telling the story of an experience I had in the 1960s when I tried to organize a community to keep it from being destroyed.
The immediate cause for this destruction was a white apartment management that had so much contempt for black Americans that they felt no need to continue to maintain apartment buildings blacks moved into. I was fighting to force them to.
I had come to rely on a wise old black preacher who was seated next to me when the door to our community meeting burst open and some drunken, angry white men advanced on me with clubs and ax handles, cursing me as a “dirty, commy, nigger loving Jew.”
The danger was real and serious. I didn’t know yet just how serious. Something happens to me when things get nasty—in a traffic situation or on the streets. It isn’t courage; I don’t know what it is. My insides go cold and I feel nothing. Time slows so much that it nearly stops.
But, I thought, I am not alone. I looked over at my “steering committee”, nearly all black. They were frozen in place, fear all over their faces. The old black pastor stood up suddenly, looked at the drunken deputy sheriff and pointed at me.
“If I had known,” he shouted, “what sort of a person this man was, I would NEVER have had anything to do with him.” It dawned on me that I was utterly alone. My black “allies”—even though they out-numbered the white bullies by a substantial number, and were mostly young and strong—were going to sit on their hands and watch me get pounded.
My eyes went back to the advancing drunk. He was half-way down the aisle, coming toward me, right where a cross aisle went from right to left across the auditorium. Somehow I felt moved to ask, “What are you so afraid of?”
His bully boy followers hawed and hooted. Him? Afraid? He’s not afraid of nothin’! The sheriff, however, came to a full stop. He turned to his left, ran down the cross aisle and out a side door. His bully boys stopped, looked confused, then turned and followed him out.
I felt the meeting had gone its full length. I dismissed them and they left (I would hope sheepishly). One of the younger, husky black men came up close to me and said, “We thought they were going to kill you.”
Well, duh, thanks for all your help—verbal and otherwise.
The next morning as I was going up the steps to my office one of the attendee’s slipped up side of me. He asked me to understand, “You’re a white man; you have options. You can live anywhere. We’re black—we don’t have options—so we couldn’t help you.”
I looked at him, “I thought that was the whole point of what we were doing. Helping keep the places you could live maintained and decent.” He gave me no answer. I took his brown arm, held it next to my white arm and said, “I guess we were born with our uniforms on.”
I moved out of the complex a few weeks later. Some of the black steering committee helped me load a U-Haul truck. I appreciated the help—but I do suspect they were just happy to be rid of me. I never saw any of them again.
Over the next years, the scales fell from my eyes. I made no further efforts to assist in areas where I would find myself alone and without backing. I expressed no surprise when a charming black hostess invited me to dinner and then went into a tirade about how all whites should be killed (I tend not to accept invitations to any more black homes—we smile and chat in public venues).
I learned in a hard and dangerous way that I am not trusted on their side of the fence (imaginary fence or real) and I learned the sad reality that I cannot trust them. Many of the million folk who have fled Detroit learned the same hard, unhappy lesson.
If somehow, someway, somebody doesn’t trust somebody, we’re going to have a lot more dead cities like Detroit—and it won’t be all the auto companies’ fault. God help us.
More later.

Michigan's Hiroshima--Distrust in Detroit

Last time I wrote about the desolation we still call Detroit. I referred everyone to the blog posted by Jeremy Korzeniewski on “autoblog”. It showed appalling pictures of what has become of vast tracts of the city of Detroit: falling down ruins, streets with no buildings left standing, something that looks a lot like Hiroshima after the big blast.
I conceded his point that the factories and auto industry that made Detroit a powerhouse have declined and even gone away. But I also pointed out that Detroit is a city known for its racial hatreds. Riots, military blockades and open hostility have marked its 20th Century history.
This history—and its ongoing aftermath—has made salvaging what’s left of Detroit much more difficult. It would be hard, indeed, to talk a middle class (both white and black) into coming back into a city so manifestly without services and unsafe.
They have fled—and taken their ability to pay the taxes necessary to maintain services and create new ones with them. What’s left cannot support itself. Detroit’s big problem right now is money—there isn’t any. Nada. Let’s look at some of the reasons for this.
The big companies (big tax payers) are limping badly. The age of the automobile and truck has made it possible to move businesses out into suburbs, abandoning the inner city. The sheer distrust and hatred that exists between black and white segments of the population.
That last one made me look at myself in the mirror of reality. I must confess that, way down deep inside, I find it hard to trust Barack Obama and his wife. (NOT because I think he was born in Africa, is a socialist or a Muslim, for crying out loud!!!)
My distrust is based solely on the fact that he is an American born black man. (I’ve known and been at ease with several AFRICAN and CARIBBEAN blacks—they somehow don’t carry with them the innate paranoia I’ve seen in too many American blacks. And also, American blacks do not trust me—it is often wise not to trust a man who will not trust you.)
Let me tell you a story. In the 1960s, I was blue eyed soul. I worked for blacks, I fought for blacks, I marched for blacks. They accepted me and I was permitted to call them “nigger” (as they called me) in the intimacy of friendship. I was too naïve to sense the distrust.
Washington, D.C. was just being integrated. One year they suddenly “integrated” a section of my all-white apartment complex. That meant they moved a group of black people in (did not screen them as they did whites—so some prostitutes set up business in that section) and stopped maintaining those areas.
I wanted the same standards maintained for black tenants that had always been there for white tenants--and the same maintenance. I met some of the black tenants, professionals like myself, and found we all agreed.
Working for the White House, I had access they lacked. I brought to bear upon the management of that complex the Americans for Democratic Action (a power in those years), the law firm of Nolan and Porter (the most influential in Washington then) and the “Washington Post”.
Then I located a white liberal pastor who had long worked to integrate the neighborhood and knew it well. I helped him call a community meeting. Hundreds came. Foolishly I turned the meeting over to him. He drew round after round of applause and, just when the iron was hot, he failed to strike. To use salesmen’s parlance, he didn’t ask for the sale.
He had no one sign anything, join anything or do anything. He just sent them all home with a promise of another meeting in a few days. I was horrified. I left with a very bad feeling. This would not be good.
But the next week I created a steering committee and we met several times. One man there proved to be a tower of strength, knowledge and wisdom. He was an elderly black preacher—who could fill me in on more neighborhood details than I had ever dreamt of.
I leaned on him. When the next meeting came, I had him sit right up next to me. Only fifty or sixty people showed up. Even the white preacher wasn’t there. But my friend was. I called us to order—when suddenly the door flew open.
In marched a drunken, retired white deputy sheriff with a club in his hands. Behind him were four or five more white bully boys. They advanced toward me, breathing threatening and slaughter. I have probably never felt more like an endangered species.
Let’s continue next time.

Detroit--Michigan's Hiroshima

I grew up in a Michigan where Detroit was the engine that pulled the rest of us along. Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second city, lived to make parts for the auto industry (which still included Studebaker, Packard, Hudson and Nash—as well as Pontiac, Oldsmobile and DeSoto.) If Detroit sneezed, West Michigan collapsed with pneumonia.
Today Grand Rapids looks fairly vibrant. Last week my wife and I took a stroll down Division Avenue—long a haunt of prostitutes and gangs. There were lots of couples and single women out walking. Construction cranes are all over downtown.
Detroit has eight supermarkets left within its 140 square miles—at least 40 square miles of which look like downtown Hiroshima right after the blast. Empty spaces, collapsing factories, streets that have no buildings on them.
A lot of this catastrophe can indeed be blamed on the collapsing auto market. GM’s market share is down from over 50% to around 20%; it has shed two out of five of its core brands. Chrysler looks a great deal like a dead company walking.
Ford is doing better but that is a very relative term for a company that once put a nation on wheels and created the largest auto market in the world. (China has that honor now.) If Huxley wrote “Brave New World” today, he would not refer to the “year of our Ford”.
The aerial photos of Detroit that were released online today were appalling. A chap named Jeremy Korzeniewski posted them on something called “autoblog”. If you didn’t get enough pictures of Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Hamburg, downtown Rotterdam or London after World War II, these are well worth looking at. These are taken right here.
It’s a city that died—without the help of an enemy air force. One of things they are thinking of doing there is clearing everything manmade out of whole sections of Detroit—and bringing back farming, for instance. After all, the city has lost nearly a million residents since 1950.
It would be much cheaper not to have to plow streets or maintain water lines and sewers that don’t service anyone any more. Fewer police and firemen would be needed—in numbers more in line with the present tax base.
But it isn’t just the car companies that did this. I remember walking through bustling business districts in the 1950s and turning off to walk through neat, prosperous urban homes to visit friends. No boarded up buildings, no thought of danger, no trash to kick my way through.
You wouldn’t do that today. Race relations played a big role. It wasn’t just bigoted whites fleeing. I was part of “white flight” out of a once lovely urban neighborhood in Grand Rapids. It was once chock full of college professors, business owners, MDs, dentists, teachers, executives and other professionals. If you are white, don’t walk those streets after dark today.
I’ve been mugged there twice, once in front of a 3,000 sq ft home, the second time in front of what was once one of the best men’s clothing stores in the city. I don’t recollect how many times a car pulled up along side of me or my wife and we were told, “You’re in the wrong neighborhood, white man, get out of here or we’ll kill you.”
When live ammunition started flying, our entire family moved out of the neighborhood my mother and then I grew up in. (Much “white flight” occurs for similar reasons.) The head of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission agreed with me that this was part of a deliberate strategy of terror to drive whites out.
Detroit went through the same thing. In schools, on sidewalks, with bricks through windows. And the tax base ran for its life. I watched a downtown mall die in Muskegon for similar reasons—mommies with money to spend would no longer go there.
If the hatred—not just of whites for blacks, but of blacks for whites—is not assuaged (and we can’t all wait for “them” to stop hating “us”—they may never), then we are going to have more and more Detroits and boarded up homes in places like Grand Rapids and Muskegon.
Mandela of South Africa, who spent nearly 30 years in a white prison for being black, understood this. We need a lot more people—on both sides of the color line—like him. Mr. Korzeniewski’s pictures are a good reminder.

Simple Arithmatic That Tea Partys Miss

Last time I talked about what I consider to be the absurdity of the Tea Party position—however mainstream American it may be. Now let’s talk about some valid concerns Americans do have about our present governmental activities.
Last evening I stopped to chat with a neighbor who has run his own construction business for several decades, does good enough work to be prospering in recession, and is much too busy to take time off for tea parties of any kind.
He just evaluates the fiscal policies in Washington from the standpoint of the simple arithmetic that has to govern his own business decisions. If you earn $1,000 a week and you continually spend twelve or thirteen hundred, at some point something bad is going to happen.
Very basic—a well educated third grader could probably walk you through it. Neither he nor I are refuting Keynes—but Keynes in his wildest imagination probably didn’t contemplate a level of governmental spending in GOOD TIMES and BAD that led to consistent and often huge deficits on a regular basis.
We haven’t just spent our way out of recessions and depressions. If bad years were the only time we had run deficits, our national debt would be infinitely smaller. Keynes’s idea was to ramp up government spending when everybody else was flat—and, hopefully, to PAY IT OFF IN GOOD YEARS. Like a nearby power plant works in Michigan.
At night when demand for electricity is low, it expends energy pumping Lake Michigan water into a huge reservoir. When day comes and homes and factories turn on the juice, the water flows back out, turns the turbines and generates power.
This is the backup plant that is used to restart electrical plants all over Michigan in cases of major power failure. It’s precisely the sort of thing Keynes had in mind in government finances. Unfortunately the United States has been running the water out without pumping much in for decades.
My neighbor’s concern is that at some point the fiscal reservoir is likely to run dry—even if he doesn’t say it in those terms.
He’s right. The American lust for a free lunch—first noted when we refused to pay our fair share of defense taxes during and after the wars with France—is eventually going to catch up with us. Since the 1960s (the game began long before Reagan) we’ve been cutting taxes (water being pumped into the reservoir) and piling on new programs, Medicaid, college aid and grants, Medicare, Social Security entitlements, enhanced welfare and fighting wars (water flowing out), without paying for it.
Had we been regularly replenishing the reservoir, we might well have afforded a few trillion here, a few trillion there to bail out our economy in 2008. (Then again, if we had always been the kind of people willing to PAY for government services, we might never have gotten into the mess we were in a year ago.)
At some point, as Greece found out, the reservoir really will run dry. Then there will be no more juice generated—and nothing with which to restart the plant. But the problem isn’t a “socialist Obama” who is the first president ever to run us into debt.
The problem is us. WE stood at Bunker Hill or at Boston Harbor and shouted that we wouldn’t pay for the services we demanded from government. WE voted for what George H.W. Bush called “voodoo economics” back in 1980 when we elected Reagan.
WE cheered as Lyndon Johnson slashed taxes, created vast new programs and launched a very expensive war all at once. WE loved George W. Bush as he cut taxes and launched his world wide war on terror.
Someday we definitely are going to get a notice: “Your credit limit has been exceeded”. That’s when the tea party people will really have something to be mad about.

Tea Parties--The Ultimate American Party

Americans have always loathed being asked to pay their fair share of anything. This is, after all, the “land of the free—lunch”. If they can’t get it free, they want it cheap—quality be hanged.
I’ve talked about how an American secretary will go to a discount store and buy a dozen cheap outfits that last only months—whereas a European secretary, specifically the French, may buy only three or four outfits—but they will last (and look good) for years.
American car manufacturers understood their market for years—making cars designed to go only about three or four years and then be replaced. Only when cars started to cost as much as small houses did Japanese and European cars that run longer appeal to the American buyer.
GM and Chrysler’s troubles aren’t all of their own making. They have for decades given the American consumer exactly what he wanted (as K-Mart and Walmart did with clothes); they were blindsided by the change in consumer sentiment brought on by high prices.
And—have you noticed?—American voters have made an art of keeping both parties in enough power to ensure that no one will take their government freebies (Social Security, Pell grants, etc.) away and no one will make them pay the full cost for them.
That has gone on for so long that both voter and government seem to assume that it can go on forever—after all, who says that what goes up must absolutely come down? It hasn’t happened in American politics; why should it start now?
Now the people who object to making health care available for all Americans are rallying their troops with “tea parties”. If you don’t have health insurance, the attitude seems to be, “Go out and get a job”--ignoring the fact that fewer and fewer jobs come with benefits.
The hostile attitude toward government comes with a horrific fear of government. The government that we trust to build roads, highways, airports, water mains, sewers—to protect us from the outbreak of strange new diseases, to fund medical research, to fight to keep our oil supplies coming—that government would suddenly be a monster if it took over health care.
By building roads and highways, government has made the auto industry the most heavily subsidized industry in human history. And where would Boeing be if government didn’t build airports and maintain safe air routes? But subsidize health care for the poor and sickly, the under-insured, those in jobs without benefits? God forbid!
It’s a bit like the situation back in the 1760s when the British government asked Americans to pay their fair share of the costs of a war that protected them from the French and Indians. We rioted, we burned houses, we boycotted—until London gave up.
Or in the 1770s when London—admittedly to save some British investors—subsidized a tea company (no American government would EVER subsidize a company, right?) and allowed tea prices to fall far enough that it became cheaper to buy legal tea than the stuff brought in by American smugglers like John Hancock, we held the “Tea Party” to end all tea parties right there in Boston harbor. A huge amount of money was lost.
The British government reacted by defending the investors (again, no American government would act to defend investors over the desires of price-driven consumers, right?)—and we had a shooting war on our hands.
We would have been in serious trouble if the French, our old enemy, hadn’t taken the opportunity to get revenge on Britain by supplying us with 90% of our munitions, cannon, warships and troops. We repaid them by signing a separate treaty with England that left France in the lurch. She went broke, her government collapsed—and we didn’t have to pay.
Yes, indeedy, tea party time is definitely American. Especially when someone has the nerve to ask us to pay for something. We’ll take it free when we can, cheap from the lowest bidder when we absolutely can’t get it for nothing. Ah, piffle.

The New Discrimination--Freedom of Religion

Here we go again. The University of California’s Hastings College of Law has skewered itself on the horns of dilemma it never needed to have created or to have faced. The whole matter goes before the Supreme Court tomorrow.
It seems that Hastings College of Law has a rigid policy that no organization that uses school property, enrolls students or advertises its meetings on campus may discriminate on the grounds of religious or sexual orientation.
Which immediately spelled trouble for the local chapter of the Christian Legal Society—a reasonably innocent group (no militia members here)of future lawyers of the Christian persuasion who want to meet with fellow Christian law students.
Christianity—like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism—is by its nature exclusionary. Most Christian organizations expect members to believe that Christ is God, part of a divine trinity, that he died in place of men for their misbehaviors, and so forth.
Voting members and officers of the society are expected to adhere to these basic principles. One of the principles that most annoys Hastings is the Christian attitude about homosexuality. Like theft, cheating on one’s spouse or blasphemy it is considered unacceptable.
In fact, conservative Christians go so far as to agree with the majority of the American Psychological Association membership who held that homosexuality was a perverse form of personality disorder. This was their belief back in the early 1970s when a minority group of APA members rammed through the position that it was merely a life style choice.
So the Christian Legal Society, in the mind of Hastings College of Law, joins a select group of student organizations deemed unfit for future lawyers. It will not be allowed to use campus facilities for its meetings. (No one said, incidentally, that non-Christians could not attend; merely that they could not be voting members or officers.)
The Supreme Court must now decide (again—and again and again, no doubt) whether the position of the college violates the First Amendment or whether Christians are truly discriminatory when they limit membership in a Christian organization to Christians.
The First Amendment’s “freedom of religion” clause reads as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; …”. That says two things.
One) Congress shall NOT establish a national state church (like the Episcopal Church in England, the Reformed Church in the Netherlands or the Presbyterian Church in Scotland)—especially not one that would SUPERCEDE the established STATE churches that existed in several of the states at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified.
In other words, all it PREVENTS is the creation of a federal government run/funded national denomination. It doesn’t even contemplate the new notion of keeping Christian groups off public college campuses because this might discriminate against non-Christians or atheists.
Two) In absolutely no way can CONGRESS pass any kind of law that would keep the Christian Legal Society from “the free exercise” of its religion—even if that keeps non-Christians from becoming voting members or officers.
Once again the Justices must put on their spectacles and see if they can still read the clear wording of that wonderful old 18th Century document, the Bill of Rights. They should remember that the entire basis of their legal and political power rests on their willingness/ability to interpret the Constitution and its amendments.
Why should Hastings College of Law be permitted to do what Congress itself is expressly forbidden to do? Will the court decide it has the clear power to ignore or overrule a fundamental principle of the American Democracy and its Constitution?
If the Court chooses to step beyond the protection that the Constitution provides them, then more Presidents may feel free to disregard their decisions—as Andrew Jackson did when he said, “John Marshall [chief justice] has made his law; let him enforce it.” They might take the defiance Obama has already shown more seriously. Future Chief Executives more do more than waggle a finger at them during a State of the Union Address.

Goldman Sachs Gets A "Good Smack"

That’s what mothers used to say—as in, “You need a … .” So now it’s Goldman Sachs turn to take one. Whether it will ever come to more than that, whether anyone will ever succeed in proving that this was the naughty kid who started the mess-- or not-- is yet to be seen.
After all this is an election year. There are a lot of peevish folk out there who lost chunks of retirement funds and other investments. There are a passel of poor souls who blame their unemployed status on the financial collapse of 2008. You have to be able to say, “Look, this was all done to you by wicked people, and we are punishing them.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has brought a lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, a hither-to untouched sacred cow of Wall Street. It made tons and tons of money last year and paid tons of money to the employees who took the wild risks and made the company’s profits.
“Some of those risks were too risky for the investor and not risky enough for Goldman Sachs,” the SEC is suggesting. When you sell somebody else a really risky investment—and then bet it will fail, thus betting against your own trusting customers, that can be fraud. So says the SEC.
Those were the “derivatives” that Goldman Sachs and several other major firms spent the last several years selling—to pension funds, foreign banks, each other, mutual funds and private investors. Everybody took a bath—except Goldman Sachs.
Congress voted to allow unregulated derivative trading ten years ago—and the market has grown to over 600 trillion of those little items scattered all over the place, all unregulated. They were a big part of the collapse a year ago last fall.
Of course, a having a lawsuit filed against you doesn’t mean you’re going to lose a lot (other than very major legal fees, which Goldman Sachs can probably afford—but it will put a dent in profits). But, up until now, derivatives have been left totally alone. Congress hasn’t even been willing to talk about regulating them. There has been no legal action or threat thereof. Until now.
So the SEC, which largely sat on its hands as speculations and deceptive financial instruments went wildly out of control over the past few years has finally taken action. I asked myself what this reminded me of—and came up with the following allegory.
A man robs a bank. He shoots someone. The police (government, SEC, Congress, White House) comes in to investigate. They find the bank tellers at fault for having too much money on hand—and thus tempting the robber. They say nothing to the shooter.
They find the bank guard at fault because he allowed himself to be hit over the head and disarmed. They find the bank’s customers at fault because they deposited so much money in that bank. The shot person is at fault because he visited the bank at the wrong hour.
Oh, and there was blame for the bank manager. If he had just had procedures in place to hand the money to the robber without fuss, no one would have been hurt. But no one says anything to or about the shooter. He goes free—to invest the money he got and make himself an ever larger fortune. After all, he was just being a good capitalist.
And now they are actually going to sue the shooter. Of course there is a great hue and cry among his fellow bank robbers—I mean other Wall Street investment bankers—that business will be greatly impaired if the shooter is penalized in any way, and this way of raising capital is curtailed.
I don’t know how it will all play out. A judge could throw the case out; Congress could make an unpredictable move; the White House could offer to mediate in such a way the keeps Goldman Sachs safe from all harm; juries in cases like this can be about as predictable as the path of a tornado—our national history is replete with such eventualities.
But, for the moment, some guys who caused a lot of misery with their recklessness—and, very possibly, chicanery—are having a bad evening. However briefly it lasts, that at least is some satisfaction for the folks who trusted Goldman Sachs—and its ilk—to have their backs.

Empathy ("Justice") and Law at The HIgh Court

Back during the election campaign of 1960, I got caught in a rainstorm in the middle of Manhattan. I took shelter under the flap of a newspaper kiosk somewhere around 23rd Street. It was pouring; there were no customers; so we talked.
We started talking about Kennedy. Then we segued into American attitudes toward a Catholic President (a major issue in 1960!). I was astonished to learn that he and his Italian-American compatriots had little use for Irish Catholics in general, Kennedy specifically.
From there we somehow got on the subject of the Mafia. I expressed the attitude of a mid-western WASP that the Mafia was an evil organization. He took no offense; he merely set out to explain what to him were patently obvious facts to a callow youth.
“In Sicily my uncle was a ‘capo’”—a Mafia chieftain. “A poor man came to my uncle. He said a wealthy neighbor had stolen two of his few sheep. Yes, he had gone to the Carabinieri. They had dismissed him—‘What can we do about two sheep?’
“So he came to my uncle. My uncle went to the hall or records and went through all the recorded sheep transactions of the past several years. Then he went and counted the rich man’s sheep. Two too many.
“He told the rich man, ‘Return the sheep or they will find your head in the woods’. The sheep were immediately returned. Justice was done. I can still remember the way he waggled his finger at me. “Now I tell a story about here, in New York.”
“I used to be a barber. The most valuable things I own are my old barber tools. They cost hundreds of dollars. One day I came home and found that I had been robbed—all my pants were taken and my barber tools.
“I got to thinking. At the back I share a fire escape with the apartment next door. A welfare family lives there. They are always home. One day I felt sorry for one of the older kids and I gave him one of my suits. He gave me back the coat; only the pants fit him.
“So I went to the police—explaining how easy it would be to get from their apartment to mine, about the pants. They told me there was nothing they could do.” (Police in New York limit their concern over petty robberies to filling out insurance forms so the robbed can collect on their policies. They do nothing else.)
“I went across the street to the candy store and went in the back room where the bookie was. I told him my story. He said, ‘I can’t do everything for you. What do you need to have back?’ I told him I wanted my barber tools. He nodded.
“Next day I came home and my tools are lying on my kitchen table.” He looked at me with disdain, “So, who do you think I vote for? The police—or the Mafia?” (He was speaking of the old, italian Mafia—which made its own streets the safest, quietest in New York.)
The rule of law failed him. It failed the poor man in Sicily. So they came to the local “king” for Justice. He dispensed pure, equitable Justice—with no reference to precedent or legal jurisdiction. Several of the more liberal members of the Senate are calling for what is really the same thing is they contemplate appointing a new Supreme Court Justice.
They want empathy. Admittedly the Carabinieri showed none. They want emotional considerations taken into account. The bookie did that. Failure at law—as it did when the original Equity Courts were created—has left the door open for this kind of appeal.
But what do we want? The bookie or an improved police force? How do we improve it—or the courts? These are the questions the Senate is actually facing. President Obama—a black man from our most prestigious law school—is looking at the same questions.
The problem is ancient. The solution is, at best, imperfect. But let us understand what we are really deciding. As a Democracy we have the power to choose whichever one we want; let’s just understand what the choices really are.
I think my little news vendor still has lots of company.

Justice or Law at the Supreme Court?

Many years ago I entered law school, glowing with visions of doing justice and rescuing fair damsels and other wronged souls from distress. I maintained that view for about a year. Then one evening I found myself in company with two older men, both experienced lawyers.
One was a White House counsel; the other, his friend, a Duke University law professor. Over a bottle of bourbon we began to argue. We went at it until well into the wee hours. I had made the mistake of expressing my desire to “do justice”.
They were horrified. By three or four o’clock they were yelling. “Law,” I remember the professor shouting, “has NOTHING to do with justice!! Justice is a fascist concept. Law is PROCESS!” It took me years to fully understand what he meant.
Other lawyers have called it “system”. You build it, point by point, case by case, on precedent. If you concern yourself exclusively with avenging poor widows and making everything “fair”, you run the risk of creating “bad law” as Justice Holmes put it.
I think the best lesson I ever got in what law actually is and does came from a wealthy man who bought and sold real estate. He explained what he expected from his lawyer at a closing. “I want someone there who doesn’t care a snap whether or not the deal goes through or whether it’s a good deal or a bad one.
“I want someone with me whose ONLY concern is whether all the “I’s” are dotted and all the “t’s” crossed. I’m the one who’s all excited about the deal and the purchase. I want him to be completely indifferent.”
THAT, it can be validly argued, is the proper function and behavior of LAW—a sublime indifference to the situation of any individual, a concern only that the procedure runs its proper course—based on past decisions and experience.
Anything else is in fact EQUITY. (Equity was tossed out of the American legal system around 1876.) The best example of Equity is found in the Jewish Bible, in the story of King Solomon who determines just which woman is the real mother of the living child by taking a sword and offering to cut it in half, giving each woman a share.
It set no precedent (we know of no other case where a judge/king resorted to a similar measure), it changed no law, it had no effect on “Stare decisis”—it simply got the real mother to identify herself when she begged Solomon to keep the child alive and give him to the other woman.
That is how “justice” gets done. It really has no place in law. My drinking friends were correct. The best legal decisions ignore questions of who’s right, who’s wrong—and simply try to satisfy both sides enough so that there is no rioting or assassination in the streets.
They take vengeance completely out of the hands of the aggrieved party and, as impersonally as possible, inflict it in the name of process and the state. Anything else could risk dropping back into darker times when a victim’s family was expected to exact eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
As a result, we have “unjust” verdicts where the wrong man is sent to prison or when a really heinous act by a human or a corporation does not seem to draw sufficient punishment. Law’s only concern, historically, is to maintain the “king’s peace”—to do just fair enough a job to keep the injured parties from taking things into their own hands.
It’s NOT to “do justice”—it’s to “keep the peace”. And it IS more peaceful when judges deal with murderers rather than private individuals. I don’t know if the alternative is properly called “fascism” or not, but it would be a lot less tranquil. (Drive by shootings by peevish gang members are a perfect example of some peoples’ notion of “justice”. The Mafia is legendary for exacting “justice”. Do they do a better job than the courts?)
We’re picking a new Supreme Court Justice this summer. What much of the arguing will be about is the question: Is his interest scrupulously and only the law and its precedents—or does he allow considerations of equity and “justice” to sway him? Will he create “bad law” by settling Holmes’ “hard cases” with too much empathy and fairness?
So what will we have on the Supreme Court this time? Law or Justice? Impartial process or emotion ridden empathy? Do you suppose a bottle or two of bourbon might help?
(My two mentors and I parted friends. Foolishly, I now think, I quit law school. With more patience and a better understanding I might have made a decent lawyer. Who knows?)

Public Schools--Why They Were Created

Few would argue that the American educational system—for all the billions spent on it—suffers from some serious glitches. Too many kids squeeze through with skills far too minimal to make them employable in today’s world.
It worked when a kid could walk out of school at sixteen, go into a factory and pull the handle on a punch press for several decades, and then retire on some kind of pension. It worked really well in the 1950s and ‘60s when wages for unskilled labor soared along with their pensions.
Except for a relatively few scientists and scholars—who tended to get their learning from private, parochial are public schools located in affluent districts filled with motivated—and motivating—educated parents, we did all right with the semi-literate punch press pullers.
Now the underlying problems with the system—that were always there, but of no real significance—are showing up. Brutal fact is the average public school was never designed to teach people the skills they need to live in a technologically challenging world.
Let’s go back to the beginning—1837, when Massachusetts’ Horace Mann became the first State Secretary of (Public) Education in history. The way we tell the story now, both Mann (who may well have been, personally) and the tax payers of Massachusetts were motivated by an altruistic desire to see all the little children properly educated.
Something doesn’t ring true here. Massachusetts basically invented the American (UNSKILLED) factory system—at this period in time. Kids went to work there at ages as young as eight and nine—and got no education at all.
So what got the same voting tax payers who owned the factories and employed the children at lovely low wages fired up to create a public school system? Blame the unwashed, illiterate, unwashed, Catholic Irish for that.
The factory owners were protestants—at a time when the nation was militantly protestant. Catholics were at best heretical, at worst treacherous and evil. The factory owners were largely from the Island of Great Britain, where contempt for the Irish has been epidemic for centuries.
After all the Pilgrims and Puritans who founded New England were all English protestants. Scotch Irishmen (also protestant, originally from Great Britain) gained great respect during the Revolution for their ability to shoot British sentries at vast distances—and they kept largely to the frontier areas of the new nation.
There were Germans in Pennsylvania—protestant. (New York City was always suspiciously diverse—14 languages were spoken in the city by 1660.) The rest of the new nation was largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (except for a few hundred thousand black slaves).
But, by 1830, Ireland had begun a century-long process of emigration, in which two out of every five living Irishmen fled the island—five million coming to America alone. The most Irish city in America became that once bastion of Puritan probity, Boston.
The Anglo-Saxons were shocked, to say the least, at the unwashed and illiterate condition of the new immigrants—the first of subsequent wave upon wave of non-English, Welsh or Scots folk. These “new” immigrants simply weren’t at all like the old Puritans and Virginians.
It became necessary to teach these barbarians how to be proper Americans. Teach them how to write and speak proper English, to wash their hands and bodies, to forego some of their most offensive Catholic superstitions. What better way than to fund a “non-sectarian” public school system that would teach all children to be good, clean, protestant Americans? As more immigrants flooded in, more “public” schools were created.
(Some of that kind of instruction was still found in our schools when I attended in the 1940s.) The Irish reacted, not really surprisingly, by creating parochial Catholic schools so that they could hang onto their own traditions.
But the real point is: can a public school system originally structured to teach cleanliness and protestantism and English values do an effective job of teaching math, the sciences or other purely academic disciplines? Or do we have to go way back to the beginning and construct a completely new system designed to meet the needs of our post industrial, knowledge oriented society?
Might problems with the purposes for which and ways the system was originally structured be part of the reason it isn’t working today? If so, we have bigger problems than can be solved simply by increasing or cutting teachers’ pay.

Teaching--Too Tough a Job for a Lifetime?

I’ve met a lot of teachers—from perky little blonds right out of school who just love children—to grumpy old men (and women) of forty who’ve been on the job way, way too long. Other than lawyers, teachers are the most cynical professionals I’ve ever met. Like lawyers, teachers have seen enough guilty go free and enough innocent hang.
Young teachers tend to agonize over failing students. They allow students to retake and retake tests until somehow they achieve a passing grade (don’t you wish your boss was as nice?). Experienced teachers can sound so bland when they mention that half the kids in this or that class are flunking.
A teacher I really liked, who taught honors, senior English classes and adjunct courses at college, was sitting in his classroom during that magic week in June when seniors are already gone. His feet were up on the desk; he was watching television. He grinned when I stuck my head in his door, “School wouldn’t be such a bad place if it weren’t for the students.”
Every time I tell that story to a teacher—at least to one who has taught more than five years--I get anything from a cynical snicker to a weary nod. None have ever expressed surprise or dismay. It is a shared feeling.
Listening to a principal, a superintendent, or an “educator” who is far removed from the classroom is like listening to a Congressman opine about the glories and sacrifices of war. Do you want facts? Talk to the guys in the trenches—privately, off the record.
I quit teaching in the 1960s and didn’t return for decades. I saw 129 students a day. I concluded that I had approximately three minutes a day for each kid. I.Q.s ranged from 85 to over 150. I defy man or angel to devise a single lesson plan that can cover that spread.
Some of my kids (I was in Junior High—then 7, 8 and 9th grade students) were simply waiting for the magic age of sixteen so they could walk. They were my real discipline problems. It was a rural district so some of my kids could look forward to taking over acres of rich muck land and making an excellent income out of it. They could imagine no reason why English, history or algebra was going to help them in any way. Neither could their parents.
Except for a precious few who had college aspirations, motivation was nil. When they would defiantly ask me why they needed English, I could only answer, “Someday you may visit a foreign country, like the United States, where it is spoken.” (We were in Michigan.)
I got tired of forcing the unwanted upon the unwilling. That is stressful (I gained fifty pounds in a year), and it is hopelessly discouraging. You feel like your life is such a waste. Even the occasional kid who tells you you matter isn’t enough to re-invigorate you.
(One of those kids, incidentally, whose I.Q. was over 150 and whose father really cared, is now president of the college I attended. He’s a rare case. A tour in Vietnam where he was a forward artillery spotter may have provided additional motivation.)
Maybe asking people to teach for thirty or more years is just too much. I recall reading something about Inca civilization. They divided life into three stages. From birth to 20, you were a learner. From 20 to 50 you were a producer/worker. At 50 you began to teach the learners whatever you had done all your life as a producer (men and women).
I know our society is far more sophisticated and technologically demanding than theirs was—but I wonder if the idea of NOT having “professional/life time teachers” isn’t a good one. Who can do a better job of teaching algebra, or economics, history or English—a 20 something fresh out of school or someone who worked with it all of his or her life?
There’s logic to the answer to that question. It doesn’t hurt that research shows people of grandparent age relate better to kids than do people in their twenties and thirties. Something has got to work better than the present system does.
Even beyond motivating parents to care (yesterday’s thought).

Education--Who's Really Responsible?

Our scores aren’t matching up. Japanese kids do science better than ours; New Zealand kids read better—and on and on and on. It’s somebody’s fault—somebody must be MADE to do it better. Who else should that be but the people who are paid to do it?
Wonderful story—kid comes home with a dreadful mark in Algebra. Father looks at the report card and says, “I’m really disappointed with your teacher.” Kid nods, “So am I.” Yeah. Do you suppose that’s one of the same kids that I handed an assignment to today and he said, “I ain’t gonna do this” and threw the paper on the floor? Sounds like it.
There’s no way to make him. You can send him to the Counseling Office where he’ll get a lugubrious talk on responsibility and respect for his teacher. You can kick him out of school, and that same dad in the story will stay too busy to notice. The kid’ll watch TV for a week.
There is simply no way to make those young men or women PICK UP that paper and do the assignment if they decide not to. Many teachers I talk to wish mightily (and privately) that they would bring the paddle back in school. That certainly would motivate some students.
I’m not against it. I can pull the faces to mind right now of a dozen or so high schoolers that I KNOW would react positively to that sort of stimulus and, as I sit here, I can imagine nothing else that would get them to pick up the paper and work.
But the rumble out of Washington and from more and more states is: we’re going to peg teachers’ pay to how well their students perform on the standardized tests. In other words, if those kids will not pick up his paper and work, we’ll dock the teacher’s pay.
On the face of it, that’s stupid—and it shows a kind of mindless desperation, suggesting the sort of floundering that one expects from a panicked, drowning person. (At least the life guard is sllowed to use physical force to subdue a potentially dangerous flounderer.)
Our whole system is panicked. We are graduating schools full of kids who can neither read nor write nor do sums. Each year whole faculties are trained in some new system to better teach math or reading. Nobody tells them how to get the kids to pick up the papers.
I remember reading several books on teaching experiences in inner city schools during the 1960s. The bottom line in each one of them was that there was no motivation from home. I found that to be true when I taught in 1963. The parents didn’t care—they got angry if you flunked a kid for cheating on his test, yes, indeedy. But they saw little enough use for education themselves. Why hassle their kids about it?
Illiterate immigrant families on New York’s lower East Side produced untold numbers of doctors, lawyers, writers, accountants, teachers and scholars during the last century. Why? Parents believed that the classroom was the only way out of the sweat shops—and if the teacher even hinted that the kid was a problem? Boom! I know I never wanted my Grand Rapids parents to hear about problems at school. They didn’t do a lot of teaching, but they motivated me! So did a lot of my friends’ moms and dads.
Parents have got to get involved again—and not automatically side with their child when there’s a problem. The paddle may have to come back for kids who have no parents who care enough to motivate them.
The teacher cannot do it alone. He or she has been left with nothing in his or her educational arsenal with which to deal with the kid who doesn’t care—and the parents who don’t care. Cutting teacher pay will not motivate parents or students.
This is the emphasis that must come out of Washington. Teachers CANNOT do it alone. There must be books in the home, parents willing to take the time to read to young children, to turn the TV off and have quiet times for study. (Pull the cable out, deny internet access during certain hours.)
(But the parent wants to watch too—and play computer games. He often doesn’t care enough for his kids to deny himself. Kids who do care often come to school exhausted because they didn’t start studying until after midnight.)
Education doesn’t take place at home—but it MUST begin there. The motivation must start there. No child must be allowed to enjoy the security that comes from knowing he can drop his paper on the floor, refuse to work, and there will be no consequences.
Cutting salaries because we parents have allowed that to happen is simply vicious.

Student Loans--The Next Bubble?

Last week a friend of ours was looking over some application forms for college when she looked up and said, “We’ve had a ‘Tech Bubble’; we’ve had a ‘Housing Bubble’—the next bubble will be the student loan bubble.”
She’s thinking of going back to school and finishing the art degree she never quite got back in the 1970s. Along with sticker shock at tuition prices, she’s been both astonished and horrified at the nonchalance with which colleges assume she will be taking out thousands of dollars in student loans. It’s simply expected.
These loans are expected because, today, books alone cost more than tuition did when she started college in 1972. Parking fees alone at several area colleges equal what I paid in tuition when I started college in 1957. (My youngest son’s high school even charges for parking this year.)
College after college says, you get so much in direct scholarships (over the years this friend has maintained a 3.96 GPA), so much in work study, and the other ten, or fifteen or even twenty thousand a year will come in the form of loans.
This morning I had occasion to visit a local college campus. I overheard some students talking—very casually—about the thousands of dollars they had accumulated in loans. (This was at a relatively inexpensive state college.) I joined the conversation.
I mentioned my son who has gone back to graduate school. When he started three years ago, his job prospects looked very bright. Now, as he finishes his course, those prospects have dried up. There isn’t a job in his field this side of the Arab oil states—if there’s one there.
He’s slated to be done in June. He owes thousands—which, three years ago, he assumed he could nicely pay back with the job he was expecting. Six months after his last class, job or no job, the clock runs out and he must start paying back those loans—with substantial interest.
His best option seems to be to take out another loan, return to school in the fall, and put off the evil day of repayment for another year. I mentioned this situation to the students I was chatting with. “Yes,” one of them said, “my brother is in his seventh years at the University of Michigan.
“He’s caught In the same bind.” The only problem with his temporary solution of taking more classes to avoid repayment is that this just accumulates more debt. When the clock does run out, he will have far more to repay than he ever planned on.
Just like in the real estate boom days, people took out big mortgages imagining that raises would come automatically and paying off the mortgage would be easy. When the bottom dropped out, that assumption proved to be grievously faulty.
How many kids are in the same bind my son is—or the brother of the student I talked to this morning? What happens if many of them stay in school for another year, racking up more debt, and then NEVER find the expected, high paying job with which to repay.
What happens when they need to buy transportation, pay high rent and start supporting themselves—all after servicing that huge student loan debt? What happens if enough of them simply cannot do it?
What do the banks do that cannot collect on all of these lovely student loans they so willingly (just like mortgages) pushed on tens of thousands of kids all over the country? Do we have another debt/credit crunch? Who bails out this one?
My acquaintance may or may not be proven correct—but it is certainly something worth watching out for over the next few years.
It’s nothing I hear them worrying—or even talking—about in Washington or on the financial pages. But they were telling us before the last two bubbles popped that something fundamental had changed in the market. It hadn’t then—has it now?

Democracy In Iraq--BOOM!

Was it five car bombs—or was it seven—that went off in Baghdad the other day? I guess it depends on whether you count in Arabic or English. The locals say one thing; what’s left of the American military presence says the other.
We sponsored an election. It was apparently a reasonably fair election; it was also a dreadfully close election. We take close elections to the Supreme Court or the loser simply quits and lets the other guy have it. In simpler societies, recounts can get bloody.
So far, just in April, 100 Iraqi’s have died in the process. This comes just as we are preparing to cut the 96,000 GIs remaining in Iraq down to under 50,000. That should be completed by September; everybody is scheduled to leave by next year.
Why does this remind me of 1921?
What happened then, you ask. Read on—and see if it sounds familiar. There was a once a province of the brutal Turkish Empire that was maintained by force of arms, not by democratic mandate or agreement of the mutually hostile tribal and religious groups.
The Turkish Empire went away in a cloud of gun smoke back in 1918 and the British decided to take this province over. Mesopotamia, as it was then called, had NEVER been a unified country. Already by the end of World War I, people were beginning to sense just how much oil this piece of earth contained. Britain was quite willing to take on that burden.
Britain, however, was short on cash, and there was not a lot of political sentiment back in England for another foreign war—even for oil. In fact there was none. World War I had left England broke and sick of war—she wanted her boys home.
So young Winston Churchill, who was Colonial Secretary in 1921, held a meeting in Cairo where he came up with what seemed like a brilliant idea—to him. He would 1) combine three hostile tribal areas in Mesopotamia—that of the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunni’s into one brand new country, called Iraq.
Two, he installed one of the characters out of “Lawrence of Arabia” as king—thus creating a unified national government. (This chap, by the way was from Arabia and had already been tossed out of Syria for trying to make himself king there.) Then, 3) Churchill decided to create an Iraqi national army under this new government so that the British troops could go home.
Cheaper, fewer British casualties, instead of three areas to pacify—one nation state with its own army. Absolutely brilliant plan. Rather like the plan Churchill had as a boy when he sought to gain entrance to a “haunted house” by blowing up a home-made bomb in the outside well. He blew himself high in the air and never found the “secret passage” into the house.
His plan for Iraq didn’t work either. The three Mesopotamian tribes went right on hating each other. The new government was powerless to stop them from killing each other. Without sufficient British troops on the ground to pacify things, everything just go worse.
In 1930, Britain quit and went home. They left Iraq to its new king (whose entire family was finally wiped out in 1958—by a group that included Saddam Hussein). Churchill’s grand design exists today only in the name on the map—where the three groups that still hate each other live to this day.
Now it’s America’s turn to try to create a nation state out of these three groups. (Like the British, we’ve already given up on the oil.) Like the British we are only too willing to pull our own troops out and leave the mess to the Iraqi national army.
One can almost see Mr. Churchill, sitting on a back bench in heaven, shaking his head as he looks down and murmurs, “Good luck”.

Afghanistan--Show Me The Way To Go Home!

I dislike very much when something I have thought about threatens to come to pass. Several months ago I wrote about the very tenuous supply line we have for troops and materiel coming into (and out of) Afghanistan.
I repeat again: the country is landlocked. To the west lies Iran—somehow I don’t see them letting our supply or troop delivery planes fly through their airspace any time soon. To the east lies Pakistan—a dubious ally with very good reasons not to let large amounts of American equipment or troops traverse its territory.
These two nations meet south of Afghanistan—blocking access to the sea. To the north lie a series of former Soviet Republics—from west to east, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—all primarily Muslim, all still in the Russia sphere of influence.
Just north of Tajikistan lies the smallest and poorest of the former Soviet Republics, Kyrgyzstan—which also borders Russia and China. Over half the country is situated 10,000 feet up, which does nothing to add to its wealth .
One way the tiny nation (five million souls) thought to make a little spare cash was to allow the United States to build a major airbase there. The US Transit Center at Manas International Airport just outside of the capital city of Biskek has become a crucial link in our supply chain.
That worked wonderfully as long as the regime that granted us the rights to that base remained in power. Last week that regime came to an end. It seems that the populace became peevish over things like a 200% raise in utility rates—and major corruption by the pro-US government.
Riots broke out and people tossed the old regime out. The apparent victors are calling for closing down the American base.
So far the base reports it is operating normally. The shooting seems to be limited to the capital city for now. Even if the base is shut down, that will not immediately choke us to death in Afghanistan. But it should sound a whole lot of alarm bells in both the Pentagon and Kabul.
What happened in Kyrgyzstan could very well happen in other Muslim states north of Afghanistan and even in Pakistan. We should start—if we haven’t already—thinking very seriously about how we are going to get a whole lot of Americans and NATO types home again if the not-too-unthinkable happens sometime in the future.
Russia has influence there. She is not our friend. She may, for the moment prefer that neighboring Muslim radicals spend their time shooting at Americans rather than Russians—or she may decide to propitiate a few Muslims by inducing her former republics to shut down our northern supply line. I dislike the thought that we are in anyway at the mercy of the former home of the KGB.
Is China our friend? She, too, may not mind us shooting up a few Islamic extremists at the moment. But what if her western Muslim tribesmen become fractious and she starts looking for ways of making them happier?
The world north of Afghanistan could turn upside down at any moment—and we have no real control over the situation. Were I a general in Afghanistan that reality would not make me a happy man.
In Iraq, at least, we have access to the sea. We can come and go—right now—pretty much as we please. In Afghanistan we remain dependent upon a little help from some very dubious friends.
And we think we’ve got troubles NOW. Oh my.

Obama--Cutting Back The Nukes: Good Idea?

The Obama Administration just announced that it is going to change certain aspects of American nuclear war policy. Specifically it is going to list situations in which it would NOT resort to nuclear weaponry. That reverses policy that has been in place most of my life.
The idea makes me nervous. I understand that there has always been pressure to take nukes out of the military equation because they scare the liver out of everybody. But, I remind you, that’s the whole point of nuclear deterrence.
Let’s not forget that it has worked. It’s been sixty-five years since the last major war. There were only twenty-one years between World War I and World War II. There were 99 years between World War I and the previous world war (the Napoleonic wars). That century without major war lasted only so long as one nation maintained an absolute preponderance of naval power.
So long as no would could sneeze or speak without British concurrence you had peace. When Germany built a fleet to rival England’s, war became as inevitable as a fallen soufflé in a fireworks display. The atomic/hydrogen bomb eliminated the need for any one nation to have absolute military superiority. You didn’t mess with anybody who had nukes and a credible willingness to use them.
When I was in graduate school, former President Eisenhower’s foreign policy was a thing of contempt and distain among modern young (and liberal) professors. Eisenhower was a major architect of the policy of massive nuclear retaliation.
Kennedy won the election of 1960 in part because he demanded that we limit our dependence on nukes and come up with more conventional options. Like Obama, he worked to limit situations under which we would use nuclear or hydrogen weapons.
In a seminar course, a professor of mine sneeringly asked if anyone wanted to try to defend Eisenhower/Dulles foreign policy. (It was also an article of faith among liberal scholars that Ike was merely a puppet for John Foster Dulles.) I agreed to try.
I did lots of reading. I soon could demonstrate that, if anyone was the puppet, it was Dulles. I came up with a lot of other facts that definitely indicated Eisenhower’s methods of preserving the stalemate peace between the Soviets and the US had a lot to be said for it.
I summed up what I had learned in a simple allegory with which I began my presentation. I created the verbal image of an old western bar room (pre-atomic Europe, if you will). Every Saturday night there was a shooting (The Napoleonic Wars, World War I, The Seven Years War, etc.). and every Sunday bodies were buried.
A new sheriff was elected—who had seen enough gun fights and didn’t like them (Ike). The first Saturday night he was on duty, he carried a beaker of liquid into the bar. “This,” he announced, ” is a jar full of nitro-glycerin.” He sat down, set the jar on the edge of his table and ordered his dinner. “Golly,” he said, “I hope no one knocks this glass over.”
No shooting that night, or the next or the next. Things went on for a few years until a young fellow (named Kennedy) ran for sheriff. “How awful,” he proclaimed, “to have such dangerous stuff as nitro in a bar full of people!!! Let’s get rid of it!”
He got elected. He removed the jar of liquid that scared people so much and came into the bar with the latest model Colt pistols on his hips (remember McNamara and the Whiz Kids at the Pentagon?). A couple of Saturday nights later there was a shooting, and then another. The undertaker was back in business.
My instructor was enraged. He ranted at me for a full hour after class was supposed to end. He walked out muttering, “I didn’t think it could be done” and gave me an “A”. Today, of course, most historians think better of Eisenhower than they did in 1966.
Let’s not forget WHY he had that bottle of nitro sitting on the table.

Geography--What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

Years ago when I was in graduate school, I opted for a survey course covering Chinese history. As the course went into its third week or so I became terribly confused. This baffled me—no history course of any kind had befuddled me since I was ten years old.
Why now? What was the problem? It struck me: I had no concept whatsoever of interior Chinese GEOGRAPHY. I spent several hours one afternoon poring over maps of China—and my confusion was gone. I enjoyed the course.
Americans are notoriously bad at history. Most can’t tell you within several decades when either the Civil War or the Revolution occurred. Most also have zero notion of geography, American or world.
Harvard University’s admissions office has sent applications back to residents of New Mexico, telling them they needed to apply on forms for foreign students. Credit card companies and ticket venders for the last American Olympics (1996) have made the same mistake.
Ask a kid on the East Coast to locate Idaho or Arkansas; ask a child on the West Coast to find Rhode Island or Delaware. Many will fail. Then there was the hotel clerk in Ottawa (Canada’s capital) who remembers American tourists asking her where the Polar Bears were.
The other day I subbed in a room where three of the World History classes were taking an open book test that involved knowing world geography. It was fun—and appalling; these were sixteen year old eleventh graders—to listen to their questions.
No one seemed to know where the Andes Mountains were. Very few could locate Russia on a world map and no one that I saw could tell which nation in Europe had the largest population. When asked which language is used in the most countries in Asia, a lot of them ventured that it might be English. None seemed to know that there are a raft of new nations in Asia that speak Russian.
They might have a cousin fighting there, but very few could locate Afghanistan—and the question of which national capital was located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers floored a majority. Again, some might even have relatives serving in Baghdad.
Bahrain may as well have been located on the moon—reading maps with latitude and longitude clearly demarcated was a forgotten art. Locating the arctic circle was beyond most, and the whereabouts of Australia was a complete mystery.
And so it went, around the globe in blithering befuddlement. This isn’t new. When Vietnam turned hot in the early 1960s, most Americans hadn’t the foggiest where it was. It was in World War II that our lack of geographic knowledge turned truly deadly.
The British kept trying to tell Eisenhower and the Americans to land NORTH of the Monte Casino pass in 1943. They had been taught in grade school that the pass there blocks the passage from northern to southern Italy. They wanted to bypass it by landing north.
Ike wouldn’t listen. South of Monte Casino seemed closer and safer. So he landed at Salerno. It took him until September, 1944, to fight his way up the peninsula. The Germans were able to hold out a year and kill thousands of allied troops.
We now know that the German commander was prepared to concede the entire peninsula to us if we had landed north of Casino. We’d have gotten to the Po River by September, 1943, not September, 1944, had we known our geography.
I still remember the day I spent mastering the rudiments of interior Chinese geography—and I recall vividly the confusion I felt BEFORE I mastered it. A tad more emphasis on geography—especially as it applies to politics, war and diplomacy wouldn’t hurt any of us—in school or in the Pentagon.

Easter--When It All Comes Together

Easter Sunday—everything I wrote about Maundy Thursday and Good Friday would be meaningless twaddle if it weren’t for today. This is the day when it all began to make sense. This is the day when the Twelve Apostles, finally, began to get what Christ was talking about.
Up until Easter Sunday (Paskha, or Passover, they call it in most European countries, after the original Jewish celebration), Christ looks like a somewhat suicidally dumb schmuck. He was told not to go near Jerusalem. He had so thoroughly annoyed (and FRIGHTENED) the political and religious leaders of his time that it was dangerous for him to go.
One of his own followers, after they could not dissuade him from going, turned to the others and shrugged, “Let’s go with him—and die with him”. They were under no illusions. He insisted on going and what everyone expected happened. They killed him.
Not just suicidal, but he sounds like a deluded schmuck who thought he was on some kind of mission for God. He said, “I must go to Jerusalem because that’s where all prophets get killed”. He wanted to put himself in the same category as Isaiah, who got sawed in half by an ancient Jewish king who was under as much pressure as the current Jewish leaders.
He had appalled these same leaders by claiming to be one with God—“Before Abraham was, I am”, he had proclaimed. No one missed the reference to the day God identified himself to Moses by telling him—“I am who I am.” “I am”—the unspeakable name of the non-contingent God—and, in a day when blasphemy was taken seriously, to claim to BE “I am” was the ultimate blasphemy, for which the only punishment must be death.
Besides this Christ was stirring up large crowds, dangerous to do under the nose of a Roman garrison on the edge of an Empire that faced a dangerous foreign enemy (Parthia). Jewish leaders lived in fear that some local firebrand would stir things up enough that a Roman army would move in on them and wipe out their nation and their temple. (It happened forty years later.)
So they maneuvered to get Christ killed—by the same Roman authorities they feared. They warned the Roman governor that Christ had said he would rise again; unlike the Apostles, they had at least listened to what he was saying. The Romans posted a guard so no overzealous follower could sneak into the tomb, spirit the body away, and claim he came back to life.
The Roman guard was found unconscious. They babbled about some space men in shiny suits who rolled away the huge stone at the entrance and knocked them all out. (Matthew’s account) They were bribed to shut up and the horrified leaders claimed the body was stolen.
The Apostles refused to believe anybody’s story about a resurrection until Christ walked through a locked door and identified himself. (They were so intent in hiding, it is most unlikely that they took on any Roman guards!)
Good Friday suddenly has meaning. Not only did God sacrifice his son for men—he raised him back up from the dead—the Christian Bible suggests that, unlike merely creating the cosmos, the defeat of death itself took serious exertion of divine power.
Not only does the Christian God raise Christ from death and Hell itself, but now the promise can be made to all men—“Oh death, where is thy sting; Oh grave, where is thy victory?” The Christian message becomes—“We live because He lives”. The keys to Death and Hell are now in the hands of the Son of God who sacrificed himself to save men from them.
It is an astonishing proclamation. Death does not win. What we bury will live again. Body, soul and Spirit—all because of Good Friday AND Easter morning. The last great horror of men, dying, has now had its fangs pulled.
Believe it or disbelieve it—it is an astonishing claim. Take it as truth, and it is the best news you will ever hear. Deny it—and run the risk (Pascal’s Wager) of facing an offended deity who takes a dim view of ingratitude—of whom it is written “Fear Him who, when he has killed, can kill again”.

Where Have All The Jobs Gone? Redux

The stock market is doing well; banks are profitable; companies are paying back the government what it loaned them; consumer confidence is up; there is upward pressure on home prices; some suggest jobs are getting easier to find.
All I have is anecdotal evidence from one small area in West Michigan. Maybe it’s real; maybe it’s a blip; maybe it’s an aberration—I can’t say. But it sticks in my mind.
A neighbor of mine is foreman for a defense contractor in the area. A year ago I asked him how his plant was doing, and he told me that they had five years of contracts lined up. After all, there’s a war on isn’t there? Not to worry.
He has several family members working in his plant—they’re all hard workers. One of them is a son who just bought a new home and has a new baby. This Christmas my neighbor had to lay everybody at the plant off for two weeks because it was so slow.
Last week, he had to lay off 40 workers. Included among the casualties was his own son. His guts hurt; he even shed private tears—but he had no choice. Some of the survivors are now working three and four day weeks. The guys who were laid off were told not to expect to come back, certainly not for a year or more.
This morning my wife stopped at the local community college. She’s thinking about taking some art courses there. She sat down to talk to an old friend who works there. Another, mutual friend, who worked there isn’t there anymore.
What happened? On orders from the capital the college was told to tell anyone near retirement to take it and go—or face having their benefits slashed. The college must reduce its workforce by 83 additional people by next fall. This lady knows her benefits will be cut, but she’s divorced and cannot afford to retire right now.
Five art and theater full time faculty members have retired in the past few years. So far they have been replaced by one full time instructor—and lots of low paid, benefit-less adjuncts. College tuition has climbed from $35 a credit hour to $150 in the past dozen years.
I overheard the principal at one of the high schools I substitute teach in responding to a faculty member’s question (“What are we going to do?”) with, “We’re going to privatize, privatize and privatize.” Already the bus drivers, custodians and subs have been privatized. So, who or what is next?
It saves bushels of money to privatize people. Lower, or no, benefits. Less pay. No company paid retirement plan—they can buy into 401K’s on their very low pay. Another member of a high school administration put it to me bluntly, “Next year we’re going to have to lay off teachers”. Have you ever taught in a room with 35 kids? Ha.
Incidentally, substitute teachers are still working at 20th century wages—there are so many people desperate to work as subs that there is no need to raise the pay. Oh yes, and there are a lot fewer conferences scheduled that require subs—fewer jobs, more workers.
I took my car in to get my oil changed today. The establishment, decades old—and located in an affluent neighborhood—had only one customer. Me. I commented on how slow things were, and the proprietor said, “I’ve had a lot of days like this.”
He told me the story of a friend of his who owns a business. Last year the man laid off 80 people. This year—minus all those workers and their benefits—he is making more money than ever before. He has no plans to hire anybody.
I’ve just totaled up a lot of people who have less money to shop in a society that depends on consumer consumption to maintain the economy. That can’t be good. Is this the only place that is happening? I somehow doubt it.

Good Friday Stands Alone and Unique

It’s Good Friday. It celebrates the day on which Jesus Christ was sentenced to death and executed by crucifixion—a uniquely cruel form of death, which the Romans probably borrowed from our friends the ancient Iraqi’s (the Assyrians).
It also celebrates the single event that absolutely and totally separates the Christian faith from ALL other religions. No one who understands Good Friday can possibly suggest that Christianity stands as just “another road to the same god.”
There is nothing like the events and theology of Good Friday in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, Confucianism or any of the modern animist or ancient pagan religions. If nowhere else, on Good Friday Christianity stands unique and alone.
In all these religions, man is left to seek God. It is humanity that does the seeking. It is the human being who must propitiate any offended or angry deity. It is his problem to deal with if he commits a malfeasance that threatens to deny a good reincarnation or a happy hereafter.
Allah may be merciful, but it is up to those who follow Islam to earn that mercy—by following all the requirements of Sharia law. Even orthodox Judaism holds that man must earn the good will of God by keeping the laws found in the Torah, the Talmud, the Mishnah and a host of other legal compilations. God may have sought Abraham, but after that it’s up to men.
Christianity—through Good Friday—says “No” to all of the above. God seeks man—not just one man, like Abraham or Muhammad, but ALL men. He does this, on Good Friday, because men are totally incapable of saving themselves, atoning for their own misdeeds, pleasing God or winning his favor in any regard.
Total incapacity. We betrayed and wrecked the contract he made with the very first humans and the only acceptable payment for treason is death. In the eyes of the Christian God, we are all traitors, all hopelessly tainted with the stench of high treason.
(Benedict Arnold could not have paid enough to win back the good graces of his countrymen. The only thing that would have happened to him had he ever been captured would have been death. In the eyes of the Christian God, all of us are Benedict Arnolds.)
But, according to Jewish and Christian scriptures, God made man for his own company—to enjoy his company, to raise as children and to delight in our growth and achievements. He is not inclined to just walk away and say, “Well, I lost this one”.
To understand Good Friday, it helps to understand what C.S.Lewis was saying in “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe”. Aslan, Christ, cared enough about the human Edmundd—who had betrayed him—to pay the blood debt for him, He died in Edmund’s place.
On Christmas God sent his only begotten son to die in our place. On Good Friday, he accomplished his mission and died for us. No other faith has a God willing to sacrifice so much for human beings. We don’t sacrifice, HE sacrifices in our place.
When Christianity proselytizes, it talks explicitly about one thing and implicitly about another. Explicitly it calls upon men to admit to their treason and accept the sacrifice made for them. Implicitly the question is raised—how will a God, who sent his own son to die for you, finally react if you refuse his offer and distain his sacrifice?
How would you react if you sent your kid to die for someone and he despised your offer? (That’s where and why “Hellfire and Damnation” preaching originates. It is, as Christian scripture says, “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God”. How angry would you be?)
No other faith makes such an offer—or adds such a warning. Good Friday stands unique and alone. It is a humiliating faith. It says, bluntly, “You’re helpless”. And there’s not a thing you are able to do about it. People like Christmas and Easter; Good Friday isn’t popular.