Road Less Travelled

I wonder where that road goes? With that question, I am off on another of Robert Frost’s roads less taken, as I explore Issaquah, my new home. With the scarcity of streets laid out in grids, discovery is the best way to learn my way around, especially being map challenged.

Sometimes, I leave the house on my motorcycle with my only intent being to take the next right turn or the next left turn.  The most amazing find on these serendipitous trips has been the frequency with which roads lead to a trailhead or series of trailheads.

Too many years too late, I realize I am in a hiker’s paradise.

Shall I park the bike and see where that trail goes? There is a pull to do it, but having had both legs run over by a car a few years back and an aging hip declaring it is time for a replacement, I turn the bike around and look for new roads to explore.

While I ride, I think. I see Issaquah as the antidote to a serious issue raised by the naturalist and author Richard Louv in his book “Last Child in the Woods.” Louv coins a phrase he calls “nature deficit disorder.”  He claims that in a high tech environment, kids need exposure to nature if they are going to develop normally.

When I think about this, I think about the many boyhood hours I whiled away playing in the woods of Roslyn.  Our house was on the edge of town, and it was out the back door, across and alley, and into the woods. It was my brothers’ and my unrestricted playground. I followed it with 30 years of Alaskan out-of-doors and 20 years of Arkansas, the self-proclaimed “natural state.”

At the age of 70, I still like to pitch a tent in the woods around Salmon La Sac, sit in a chair, watch the night sky chase the daylight away and marvel at the “starry, starry sky.” In early morning, I brew a cup of coffee, heat up a Cup Noodles for breakfast and watch the daylight now dispatch the darkness. It is an experience every child should have occasionally, as it is a terrific balance to the touch screen existence they live.

You may not be able to take the kids on an overnighter, but many trails around Issaquah provide a great way to let the kids experience the work of a Creator rather than always the work of the creature. So, pack a lunch, load the kids in the car, find a trailhead, and don’t forget the Discover Pass, a real bargain at $30.

Capitalism and Why It Works

August 24, 2012

The Democrats this election season are painting the Republican candidates with the brush of evil greed, as they always do. With the naming of Paul Ryan as vice presidential candidate, a one time disciple of the great promoter of capitalism and self interest, Ayn Rand, the accusations of greed have intensified.

I am one of those who does not believe that greed is necessarily evil or even escapable. Greed or self interest is a great motivator and becomes a vice only when it leads a person to do something dishonest, stupid, or harmful to others. When “greedy” producers are rewarded according to their production, as in capitalism, it leads to greater productivity and produces greater wealth from which society benefits.

When non-producers are rewarded according to some bureaucratically determined redistribution of wealth system, it leads to less production, shoddy work and greater poverty, and all society suffers. These observations are proven over and over again by sales organizations who pay their sales people on a commission basis or organizations who tie bonuses to production and quality of work as compared to those who don’t.

The willingness of able bodied people to take from society that which has not been earned is just another form of greed, a greed which says I am going to get all I can get while doing as little in return as possible. It is harmful to society and to those practicing it. It does not create wealth, rather it creates poverty.

The role of government is not to stop the wealthy from making as much as they can, but to prosecute them when their greed takes the form of dishonest or harmful transactions. Instead, what happens all too often is that the politicians who condemn greed, profit handsomely by protecting the greedy from prosecution and passing laws on their behalf to enhance that greed and both profit. There is a reason the wealth of most politicians and bureaucrats increases exponentially the longer they remain in office.

The history of redistributive societies has not lead to the utopian classless society hoped for. It has just led to a wealthy class that achieved its wealth by manipulating the system rather than providing products or services people wanted and would be willing to work and pay for. The closest this world has seen to a classes society is the capitalistic United States where even the poor live fairly well if they use their limited resources wisely.

So let’s talk about capitalism and what makes it so successful. It is a religious issue. I am not one who believes that capitalism is the economic system promoted by the Christian New Testament or blessed by God. There is no doubt the Christian faith is one of altruism and the denial of materialism. One could even make the case that portions of the New Testament promote redistribution of wealth, though I would argue against that.

What the Christian Bible teaches that speaks to capitalism is the doctrine of the fallen nature of man. This says that mankind is flawed in a fundamental way. That his focus has turned from God toward self. Man, by his very nature, is selfish and capitalism is an economic system that prospers due to this reality. Christians might want to voluntarily redistribute their wealth, but they must create that wealth in a world where the fallen nature of man is operative.

This means in a capitalistic society the “greedy” risk takers and high achievers profit, creating wealth out of self interest. From this, we all can benefit. In a redistributive society, the greed of the masses is rewarded when they take everything they can for as little effort as possible, which leads to less and shoddy production. Eventually the system destroys itself.

 Even the Apostle Paul had to finally tell the early Christians, “if you don’t work you can’t eat.” The same occurred in the early American colonies when Captain John Smith had to declare, “if you don’t work you don’t eat.” A redistributive society eventually comes to this realization and in this regard, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is quite prescient, though I’m not fond of her atheism.

Without Errors?

Claiming inerrancy for scripture is a moot point and any claim for a literal interpretation is just plain ludicrous.

To be sure, truth is found in the Bible, though not all truth. All the truth one needs to gain eternal salvation is found there. All the truth one needs to live a purposeful life is found there.

However, the idea of an inerrant scripture is neither logical nor productive. In fact it is destructive because it fosters stringent doctrinal stances that divide the Christian community rather than unite it.

There are three things that make claims for inerrancy a moot point. If there were an inerrant scripture, it would have to be found in the original manuscripts of which none exist. Several hundred years separate the oldest known manuscripts from the originals. Also, one cannot make a reasonable claim of inerrancy for the many translations the scripture has gone through. However, even if the translations were made without error, there are many words that do not translate well, if at all, from one language to another, so nuances can vary from translation to translation.

The second thing that makes inerrancy a moot point has to do with interpretation. Even if we could start with an inerrant translation, there are many portions of scripture that beg for interpretation. Only an egoist would claim inerrancy for his interpretation. One only has to look at the many different denominations or varieties of independent churches to realize that scripture does not always get interpreted the same way, and if we all claim truth for our way of looking at things, then the others are in error.

The third issue that gets involved here is that the author’s intent gets lost in our reading and understanding of the text. A modern idea in literature is that the reader completes the text or provides the meaning, not the author. What we know and understand to be the meaning of a text comes from our personal experience and understanding of words. We provide the meaning. When I first heard this, I was skeptical. Over the years, I have come to see the truth of this. Our understanding of any given word is usually only approximately the same as others understand it, rarely exactly the same. Sometimes it is drastically different.

There is also a Biblical reason why inerrancy is a moot issue. I Corinthians 2: 9-16 says truth is revealed by God to those who believe, and believers believe because they “have the mind of Christ.” This implies that Christianity is an esoteric or in group faith. A person believes because of what God has revealed to them, not because they believe the word is inerrant. Once you realize your understanding is a function of the Holy Spirit making something real to you, inerrancy loses its significance. This explains why a particular passage will speak to you today and not tomorrow. How often have you read a passage many times, and then one day you read it, and it comes alive? If God reveals the truth in a passage to you, you will believe it without a doctrine of inerrancy.

People who teach inerrancy of the scripture like to quote 2 Peter 1:21 that “holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit,” which refers to prophecies found in Old Testament Scripture. They argue that this guidance of the Holy Spirit protected the Scripture from error. And they turn to 2 Timothy 3:16 that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God,” to argue for inerrancy. However, verse 15 indicates the passage refers to the scripture of Timothy’s youth, which certainly was not the New Testament of the Christian Church.

The literal nature of scripture is much easier to deal with. We know the Bible is composed of several types of literature: law, history, poetry (which includes metaphors and similes), parables and myths (meaning fictional accounts written to present a truth, not fairy tales). To talk about anything other than law and history in literal terms is ludicrous. Did the trees in Psalms really clap their hands? Was there actually a wealthy man who left his assets in the hands of his servants to take care of while he went on a trip, and one of them buried his? There is a truth to be learned from these things that has nothing to do with the literalness of the words.

When I worked at a skid row mission, there was an Aleut who loved to regale me with the story of missionaries to a tribe of cannibals. The missionaries taught the cannibals to take scripture literally, so when they came to the part that says “this is my body eat it,” the cannibals did.

Doctrines of an inerrant and literal Bible tend to lead to a worship of scripture rather than worshiping the Truth behind those words. Human nature is fond of making “golden calves,” and it is easier to turn the Bible into one than to come to grips with the truth behind the words. There are too many Christians who have a reverence for the Bible based on its presumed inerrancy but never read the book or think deeply about what it says.

As long as I am discussing scripture, I will add my dislike for a major event in its evolution, the dividing into chapters and verses. At first glance, this is a blessing because it allows us to quickly find passages we want to read.

But, it has been a disaster, because it has also made it easy to proof-text instead of having to read passages in their entire context. Christians cannot resist the temptation to find a single text to prove their point and fire it at fellow Christians like darts rather than enter into a reasonable discussion about an entire context.

keeping them poor

Keeping them poor

I was watching Garrison Keillor interview Bill Moyers on C-span, and as they passed away the time, they said some things I was comfortable with, but they also said some things I feel compelled to comment on.

One comment on which we found agreement was the mistreatment of President Obama’s pastor, Rev. Wright, by the right wing radio talk show hosts. Modern technology makes it too easy to take words out of context and play them over and over again. It is a form of high tech slander.

As I said in a previous column, I have heard fundamentalist preachers say “if God doesn’t punish America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah. This is really no different than Rev. Wright saying, not God bless America, but God damn America, which the right maligned him for.

They then begin to wonder what had gone wrong with the religious right. How had they gotten started in the wrong direction? As they started talking about this, they mentioned how President George W. Bush had started an unprovoked war in Iraq that led to the deaths of thousands.

In this, they malign Bush every bit as much as the talk show hosts maligned Rev. Wright. They believe this because they choose to ignore the history of what happened in Iraq.

It started with the Persian Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait without provocation. The UN asked the US to intervene and liberate Kuwait, which we did under the direction of George H. Bush. Once the Iraqi army was pushed out of Kuwait, the UN insisted on a cease fire, which the US did and which Iraq agreed to.

However, a cease fire is not a surrender, nor is it the end of a war. It is only the end to current hostilities, and it comes with terms. Under the terms of the cease fire, Iraq agreed to free and unlimited inspections of their country to assure the world they were not developing weapons of mass destruction.

Saddam flagrantly violated the terms of the cease fire agreement, which means the cease fire is over and the hostilities begin again. The war with Iraq was in fact provoked by Saddam violating those agreements. It was not a new war, but the continuation of one Saddam had provoked when he invaded Kuwait.

Bush’s mistake was not that he invaded Iraq, but that he made the wrong argument for doing so. He should have argued what I just stated above. Instead, he argued he was invading because of the presence of weapons of mass destruction. When they didn’t find any, people like Moyers claimed he should not have done it. When they argue that he started an unprovoked war, they malign him.

Their second concern was that the religious right fails to show Christian compassion when they object to all the money being spent on social programs to help the poor. Again, they fail to think deep enough on the issue.

When Christ said the poor you will have with you always, he was making a psychological observation, not an economic one. The past 30 years of war on poverty should tell us that poverty is not an economic issue as we have poured enough money into the problem to make every poor person rich. If you gave every American a million dollars, within six months, some would be very, very rich and others would be very, very poor.

We do not need to spend more money on poverty to follow the precepts of the Bible. The Bible does not condemn the haves for having, it condemns those who would oppress the poor and make their lives more miserable than they already are.

Here are some examples of how we have oppressed the poor: exorbitant taxes on cigarettes; cash for clunkers, which got rid of the only cars the poor could afford; the high cost of fuel, which is a direct result of government policies; easy credit; child labor laws that favor the unions by keep poor kids unemployed; burdensome regulations that drive up the price of everything; and fostering attitudes that keep the poor tied to a welfare state.

We spend more than enough nationally, between our government and charitable institutions, to more than meet a Christian definition of charity. Our failing is that we do not prosecute those in government and business who design policies that end up oppressing the poor. One of my aphorisms states, “When something is given to us for free, it loses value in the transaction. If too much comes to us free, soon nothing has any value.” We don’t need to give more to the poor, we need to prosecute those who oppress them.

retro-abortion -- an essay

The risk of writing satire is that someone, say Adolph Hitler, will miss the point and take you literally. With that caveat, I offer this essay in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s “A modest Proposal.” A friend warned me against publishing this piece, because it is too easy for someone to miss the point of the satire and take it as a serious proposal. Even as I post this, I know there are elitist out there already planning policies to implement what I consider satire. In fact, my morning paper today (3/30/2011) carried a story about a local public school nurse who was fired for telling a class of students that special needs kids should be euthanized. Satire is useful because it puts the spotlight on the possible through the use of exaggeration and prepares people for what could be possible if good people do nothing. I wrote this to illustrate how ridiculous the arguments for abortion are by simply moving them a little further up the timeline.


“My mother went to the hospital to have me aborted.” With this, the obnoxious but often funny 15-year-old student had my attention and my sympathy. “What a terrible thing to have to live with, knowing your mother’s first choice was to abort you,” I thought. “No wonder she’s a problem student in an alternative school.”

“So, what happened,” I asked.

“They wouldn’t do it, “she said, “because I was twelve-years-old.”

She had me, and I laughed, but on reflection, I realized that as with most humor, there is also a serious side. In this case, let’s call it retroactive-abortion.

Abortion has been part of a serious national discussion at least since Roe vs. Wade. So much so that the arguments have become stale. I can predict in advance what is going to be said on the subject at any given time. It’s time to take the discussion to a new level.

Though retroactive abortion may seem radical, it is no more so than Jonathan Swift, tongue in cheek, suggesting the Irish might eat their children to keep them from being a burden to their parents. Even as children were a burden in Ireland in 1729, so they are today, though in a different sort of way. The burden of gross ignorance, which is perpetuated through having babies, plagues us today.

We have tried to stamp it out with public education, but it grows faster than we can cure it and it continues to grow. Think about it a minute: The bright people marry other bright people and have an average of one and a half kids per couple. The ignorant mate with the ignorant and have a half dozen kids per couple. This portends a disastrous trend which can easily be solved by retroactive-abortion.

Here’s how it would work. When a child reaches five or six, do a thorough evaluation with doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, ministers, and educators. Determine its IQ and social and economic potential, and if it reaches a certain standard, grant it a birth certificate and legal status as a human being. If not, euthanize it because quality of modern life seems to matter more than life itself.

If you catch yourself cringing at the thought of this, don’t rush to judgment too fast. To begin with, we have never settled the argument as to when life begins, and hence when legal protection is required. At conception? Three months? Six months? Half way out of the birth canal? Birth? Why not just make it six years? Up to that time, it is just a bit of aging fetal tissue to be surgically terminated for the convenience of the mother, a private matter between a woman and her doctor, psychiatrist, social worker, and minister.

In fact, retroactive abortion has several advantages over normal abortion. To begin with, most religions have some sort of theology about an age of accountability. If a child dies before that age, it’s an automatic trip to paradise. So, we see what kind of kid we have, and if things don’t look too promising, send it on to paradise before it’s eternally too late.

“But it’s murder,” some might object. Let’s not be squeamish about this. Murder is just a matter of legal definition after all. We have all kinds of killing that are not classified as murder, including abortion. Law makers can define retroactive abortion as a medical procedure and everything will be fine.

I know people will abhor this idea. We used to abhor the idea of abortion, but we all got used to it. We have all gotten comfortable with the idea of slaughtering the innocent but somehow cringe at the idea of destroying fetal tissue that has aged a little and in the process, given us opportunity to make a reasonable judgment about its potential. After all, it’s all about quality of life. The right to life only matters if quality can be guaranteed. In time, we’ll also get use to retroactive-abortion.

The way things are now, we don’t mind killing something we haven’t yet seen and can’t adequately evaluate, but are squeamish about killing what we can know and evaluate and eliminate only if it will become a problem. We don’t mind killing a potential Einstein as long as we don’t know it, while fussing about euthanizing a predicable burden on society.

Even though this is a workable solution to rid society of the burden of ignorance, it might be tough to sell it to an unenlightened public. The first step in selling it would be to sell the idea of making it an exceptional thing. Make it legal if the health of the mother is in question. This would include mental and emotional health. By leaving the definition of health as a private matter between a woman and her doctor, the exception will soon become the rule and people will get use to it. In the first few years there would only be a few thousand retroactive abortions across the country. But, in time the count could easily be up to a million and a half a year and ignorance would begin to diminish significantly.

In case people get upset with the ever increasing number of exceptions, we need an emotional argument to sway the masses who might object. The way it stands now, if a mother wants to get rid of a burdensome kid, she has to put out a contract on him with some back alley butcher or hit man who will do the job. The mother has to risk doing business with undesirable people, which can get pretty messy and might even threaten her own life. Whenever anyone raises the issue of again making the practice illegal, just argue that to do so would be forcing mothers to again use the back alley butchers, putting their own lives at risk.

If the fuss to do away with the exception gets too loud, move a case to the United States Supreme Court and get a judge to find a constitutional right to privacy. If a judge digs around that “living” document long enough, he can find anything growing there.

Once the right to a retroactive abortion is established, the practice will become common place enough that we will begin to see ignorance diminish. In time, liberal thinking people well see that the real issue here is one of choice. The argument will no longer be one of killing, but rather one of choice. What fair minded person could be against choice? Who would deny a mother the freedom to choose? Since the ignorant respond readily to emotions and slogans, the practice of retroactive abortion will be safe.

If necessary, throw in the economic argument also. Retroactive abortion will bring drastic reductions in free and reduced school breakfasts and lunches, food stamps, subsidized housing, medicaid, welfare payments and costs related to incarceration. All this adds up to billions of dollars that can be used for more important things.

So even though my student had hooked me on a cruel sort of joke, like most jokes, there was a serious element to her humor. After all, twelve is a little old, even for a retroactive abortion. But five or six? It might be worth a thought.

Dropped Out, So What?

Drop out
Col.


This column is for you high school and college drop outs who keep beating yourselves up for having made such an ill advised decision. Quit kicking yourselves and put things in perspective.

We live in a society that has thoroughly confused education and the acquisition of diplomas and degrees. For truly educated people, learning is a lifelong adventure. The list of successful people who lack diplomas or degrees is lengthy, but I'll mention two of my favorites.

Eric Hoffer was a popular author back in the 60's. I don't think he attended school as a student a day in his life. He did, though, spend time in the classroom as a college instructor.

He came to America from Germany with his parents as a small boy. Since he was inexplicably smitten with blindness and couldn't speak English, his parents didn't send him to school.

As a teenager, his sight mysteriously returned and he started a life long journey of self education. By the time he died in his 80's, he had authored several books, a newspaper column, and served as a commentator on PBS. He was a retired long shore man.

During the great depression of the last century, he worked as an itinerant farm worker up and down the West Coast. He had a pocket full of library cards from the many towns along his route. Public libraries became his way of carrying on his lifetime learning.

The second is Frank Schaeffer, a current author of both fiction and non-fiction and a film director. Schaeffer grew up a missionary's kid. He was supposedly being home schooled, but his schooling was pretty much being neglected by his parents. When he was a young adolescent, his parents were coerced into putting him in school, but by then he was functionally illiterate and he was also plagued with dyslexia. At some point, however, he took charge of his own education and launched a life time of learning.

The list of such people could go on and on. Google "famous high school and college drop outs" and you will be surprised at the people you find on that list. However, there is another list, the list of people who have diplomas but have accomplished little or nothing. I could start this list but it would be at the risk of libel. Instead, look around you and make your own list.

The reason an employer hires someone with a diploma or degree is the knowledge base he assumes goes with the certificate. In recent years, employers have found all too often that an adequate knowledge base isn't there. Even if the knowledge base is there, the employer is still going to have to educate the employee as to what they are being hired for. The diploma or degree helps one open the door to the job market, but there are other ways to get in.

So, what are people without the diplomas suppose to do? First they must do those things that make anyone a valued employee. To that, they must add lifetime learning. Take every training course and workshop the employer offers and then find courses or workshops they can take on their own. Learn how to use the local library and the internet to build on the education they already have. When it comes to educating oneself, the internet is an amazing place. Even those employees with some kind of diploma or degree must constantly add value to it if they are to remain valuable to an employer. If you are an employer, are you going to be happiest with an employee who, in spite of his education level, continues to add to his knowledge base or with one who hasn’t bothered to learn much of anything since receiving a diploma or a degree? Like all valued employees, the drop out should try to understand where his particular industry is going and prepare for the future, not the present or the past.

Finally, the employees without diplomas or degrees should note who in their organization is making the money and find a pathway to that job if it interests them.

The lack of a degree may keep employees from becoming the CEO of a major company, but it doesn't have to keep them from making a decent living at a job they enjoy. Even those with degrees must find ways to add value to those degrees or they are not going to rise far in their companies.

There is another side to getting that degree that is seldom talked about. Sometimes a person's degree traps them in a job they have discovered they really don't like and wish they could get out of, but they have invested heavily in the degree in both time and money and feel there is nothing else they can do.

For one reason or another, we all are at the station in life that we now find ourselves, but we live in a dynamic culture in dynamic times, and decisions of the past rarely have to control our futures. We are pretty much limited only by personal motivation.

Sleeping and Driving

It is frightening to jerk awake after dozing off at the wheel and find yourself on the wrong side of the center line. It was after one such incident that I realized dozing behind the wheel was every bit as evil as driving drunk, and I view such drivers as true low life. It is something they choose to do that endangers the life of the rest of us. Finally, I realized my behavior was no different. It had to have been the grace of God that kept me from killing some unsuspecting motorist.

Once the truth of this hit me, I quit driving while sleepy. If I start getting drowsy, I pull over and sleep whether in a car or on a motorcycle. I have more than one picture taken by a riding partner where I am napping alongside the road or on a picnic table beside my motorcycle.

So, when I decided to get a job distance driving, I knew I’d have to get a handle on this problem. First I called my brother who is a long haul trucker. "What do you do when you get drowsy?" I asked.

His answer surprised me. "I drink a bottle of water," he said.
Next, I did what I always do when I want to know something; I got a book by the leading expert on the subject, in this case, “The Promise of Sleep,” by Dr. William C. Dement, M.D., Ph.D., and discovered some interesting facts. The Exxon Valdez oil spill was caused by sleep deprivation in spite of what was commonly reported in the national press. The same was true of the Challenger accident. We Americans get one and a half hours less sleep a night than our grandparents. Most sleep related problems go undiagnosed because doctors aren't required to study sleep issues in medical school and there are few clinics nationwide that specialize in sleep. Jonesboro happens to have one.

The doctor believes that sleeping while driving is a major killer in our society. Making people aware is a mission with him. (It might have helped his cause had he dealt with it in a pamphlet instead of a 500 page book.)

Here's the information I found useful. On the average, we need one hour of sleep for each two hours we are awake. During the day, we accumulate sleep debt and pay it back at night. If we are up 16 hours and only get seven hours sleep we have an hour of unpaid sleep debt. If we don't pay it back, the debt accumulates. If we let the debt get too big, the body forces the payback.

Most of us run a sleep debt all week and then pay it back on weekends. Some of us pay it back by napping. The way to tell if you have a high sleep dept is by how fast you go to sleep when you go to bed at night or when you take a nap.

If you knock off in less than five minutes it is because you carry too much sleep debt. It takes some sleep debt, say eight hours for 16 hours of wakefulness, to make you sleepy. With a normal sleep debt, it should take about 15 minutes to go to sleep. Assuming you are not dealing with a disease like sleep apnea or narcolepsy, the proper management of sleep debt will keep you awake while driving as well as keep you alert while on the job.

Also, our internal clock or Circadian rhythm gets involved. This clock got set in the distant past when people got up and went to sleep by daylight and darkness. At certain times of the day, our internal clock starts getting us ready for sleep. If your sleep debt is too large, it is hard to override you internal clock and stay awake. This becomes a serious problem when traveling rapidly through several time zones or dealing with jet lag.

Another valuable thing Dement noted was that the caffeine in that cup of coffee you are drinking to kill the drowsies, won’t kick in for at least 15 minutes. If you wait until you are dozing at the wheel to stop and get that coffee and then get back in your car and keep driving, you haven’t helped yourself. Drink the coffee before you start dozing. Its effect will last four or five hours.

The message was pretty clear. If I want to quit dozing off while driving, keep my sleep debt paid up, drink my coffee well before I need it, and drink lots of water to reduce dehydration.

So, how did it work out? Since reading and applying the information in the book, I have driven many hours without getting drowsy. It works!